Charles A Moser, MD, PhD and the DSM

Foreword:

At the end of the 1980’s, the nascent world of open, above ground BDSM was facing very hard times.  Pansexual BDSM groups had come aboveground shortly after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, and local groups had burgeoned in major cities during the early 1970s.  The Leathersex communities’ titleholder events had become national conventions in the 1980s, and in 1983, david stein’s iconic “Safe, Sane and Consensual” campaign had gone viral among the gay and pansexual BDSM communities. 

But as the decade drew to a close, Safe Sane and Consensual looked like a PR campaign, not reality.  The HIV/AIDS pandemic ravaged the Gay and Altsex communities, putting an end to the illusion of ‘Safe Sex”.  The American Psychiatric Association came out with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV).  Although it had completed the delisting of homosexuality begun in 1974, no such revision included consensual altsex behaviors, all of which were psychopathology in the new manual.  Kink was officially not ‘sane.’  And across the Atlantic Ocean in The United Kingdom, Scotland Yard arrested several dozen Leathermen in a sting operation and charged them with assaulting their submissives.  When the Leathermen protested that the assaults were consensual behaviors, the submissives were charged as accessories in their own ‘victimization;’ English law provided no right to consent to assault.  All would eventually serve three years in prison.  American activists held their breath that judicial conservatives appointed by Ronald Regan might import this thinking to the US.  You might consent to kink behavior, but that carried no guarantee you would be protected under the law!

Charles A Moser MD, PhD, 2020 Race Bannon Advocacy Award Recipient

This article details how the contribution of one man; Charles A Moser, MD, PhD, challenged the clinical assumptions that had pathologized consensual kinky behavior for over a century before he started working to overturn them.   It is a story of the struggle to make psychiatric diagnosis abandon conventional and uncritical thinking and garden variety politics, for diagnosis based upon scientific evidence, logic, and thorough observation.  Today, the most recent revision of the psychiatric manual regards a much wider variety of sexual expression as potentially healthy than in the 1980s because of Dr Moser’s work, which first saw fruition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals 5th major revision in 2013, but continues as consensual kinks are delisted from the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as it is individually modified and adopted by the United Nations 193 member nations.  Charles Moser, PhD, MD is not recognized for this contribution by the American Psychiatric Association, but his work established the intellectual foundation for the DSM changes and inspired and international movement that is manifesting in the ICD-11 revisions.

The Context of Challenging the DSM:

“Here we must beware the game of name-calling hidden in otherwise decent but indemonstrable concepts favored by psychoanalysis, concepts such as narcissism, deneutralized libido, and prepsychotic masquerading as normal.  None of these terms has been defined clearly enough so that observers can agree when evaluating a live person.  So I avoid them.  I can only say that, within the highly selective sample that my informants present, there is no one who is psychotic, prepsychotic, or latently psychotic by the standards that clinicians accept, for example having hallucinations, delusions, inexplicable or bizarre behavior, or major pathology of mood.  And these people, were one to try to apply character diagnosis to them, are as varied as I expect are the readers of this book.  Most of my informants are stable in employment; most are college graduates or beyond, lively in conversation, with a good sense of humor, up-to-date on politics and world events, and not more or less depressed than my social acquaintances.”  — Robert J Stoller, MD, in Pain & Passion: A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of S&M (1991) pp 19.  (The emphasis is mine, the italics, Stoller’s)

Social change is very rarely the product of any single individual.  Not Frederick Douglas, Mohandas Gandhi, nor Martin Luther, great though their individual contributions may be, accomplished their social changes in a vacuum.  So it is with de-pathologizing kinky behavior.  Robert Stoller sums up the problems of destigmatizing kink in his first chapter of his book.  Having called sadomasochism a perversion, he must claw back the impression that his study is about a bunch of crazies.  At the time of its writing, his study of the world of commercial sadomasochism was three years ahead of the first representative sample study of American sexual behavior, The National Sex and Social Life Survey, which,  to get funding through Congress during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, pointedly declined to ask a single question about kink.  Stoller’s conclusion above presages the first such sample that did ask about kink in any Western country by 17 years.   This is the magnitude of the challenge that Charles A Moser took on when he conducted the first self-selected sample of American sadomasochists, and eventually decided to undertake a thorough criticism of the psychiatric diagnostic system as it related to consensual kink.

Charles A Moser, MD, PhD, did the research and academic writing that made diagnostic change possible.  His research on kink and his contribution of over 100 scholarly articles over 45 years, most on alternative sexualities, created an evidence-based conversation in psychiatry that coincided with the social changes that have made de-pathologizing kink an intellectually credible effort.  His bibliography can be found here: https://docx2.com/charles-moser-phd-md/  The links all avoid paywalls and I have employed them where possible so that you can read what Charles wrote.

To understand Charles intellectual contribution, it is necessary to describe the state of psychiatric thinking that prevailed at the end of the twentieth century as he began publishing his criticism.  That entails looking at the American Psychiatric Association’s thinking and practice in revising their diagnostic manuals.  In the late 1970s as psychoanalysis began to loosen its influence over American psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association undertook its first major revision of the DSM.  Before 1980, the manual was a plagued by disagreements over construct validity and there was poor agreement among clinicians about the diagnoses as Stoller emphasized in the above quote.  The previous diagnoses might not be wrong, but neither were they agreed upon nor testable. The strength of the changes in the 1980 DSM revision is that diagnoses had greatly improved inter-rater reliability and were described in clearer symptomatic terms, albeit at somewhat decreased emphasis upon their underlying meaning and contexts.  To destigmatize them somewhat, ‘Sexual Deviations’ were re-labeled ‘paraphilias’, a Latin/Greek chimera meaning ‘unusual loves.’  In 1980, no one was complaining that consensual paraphilias such as sexual sadism, sexual masochism, transvestism, and fetishism were stigmatized but the DSM-III did respond to intense pressure mounting since the late 1950’s to stop including homosexuality as a sexual deviation because that was so highly stigmatizing and not well grounded in the best science.  That story is told in more detail here: https://elephantinthehottub.com/2017/06.  Since 1980, the American Psychiatric Association had delisted homosexuality but asserted it could feel confident in their classifications of the on the grounds that they were clearly described symptoms that could be reliably coded.   

All that was about to change in the wake of Stonewall, as kink practitioners started to come above ground.  In 1972, Pat Bond and Terry Kolb took the Till Eulenspiegel Society (TES) out of Bond’s small apartment into the basement of the first openly gay friendly church in the country, publicizing their meetings in Screw and The East Village Other, although to do so, he had to change his original name, The Masochists Liberation Front to the name of an obscure figure from German folklore in order for even the underground press to run his meeting announcements.  On the West Coast in 1974, Cynthia Slater founded the Society of Janus (SOJ) in San Francisco.  These pioneers were testing the theory that kinky folk would have enough in common regardless of their specific sexual interests that they would get together for social meetings and durable clubs could be formed.   This set the stage for Charles Moser to gather data on people practicing sadomasochism and make evidence-informed arguments about them.

Charles graduated from the University of Washington School of Social Work in 1975, just as these social kink organizations started to form.  He was aware of them because of the sexual diversity of his initial social work placement and later private practice, and he enrolled in the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS) because it was a unique and convenient place to pursue additional training in human sexuality, a much-neglected topic in post-graduate mental health training.  In 1979, Charles completed his doctoral dissertation on a sample of self-described sadomasochists for his PhD at the IASHS, in San Fransisco.  The sample for Charles study was drawn from contact magazines and from volunteers from TES and SOJ.  In 1984, with the famous sociologist of sexual communities M S Wienberg and with C J Williams, he published his first academic paper on kink in the journal Social Problems in which they noted that their sample of sadomasochists did not conform well to the medical definitions of sexual sadists and masochists.  Instead, they argued that sadomasochism consisted of dominance and submission, role play, consensuality, a sexual context, and mutual agreement by participants to call what they were doing ‘S&M’.  That paper can be found here: https://docx2.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Social-Constituents-of-Sadomasochism.pdf.  This paper was published very shortly after the gay submissive david stein coined the slogan “Safe, Sane and Consensual’ for New York City’s Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA) in 1983 to address widespread public concerns that kink was dangerous behavior performed by crazy people, a very legitimate reading of the prevailing psychiatric definitions.  At that time, scarcely any data had been collected about kink practitioners and there was little basis for scientifically disputing negative public perceptions or psychiatric diagnoses. 

Charles went on to publish the conclusions of the first self-selected sample studies of American kink practitioners.  Prior to his work, there was only one sociological study of members of a kinky community, by Andreas Spengler, in Germany https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01541150 .  Charles challenged prevailing notions from Spengler’s German data that the only women who participated in kink lifestyles were sex workers, and that most of the men were gay.  And Moser’s data mirrored those of his urban sexology practice in the Bay Area in the midst of the developing HIV crisis.  Under these pressures, Charles left social work to take medical training to amplify his ability to serve a much more diverse sexual community than anyone had anticipated when he had completed grad school 8 years previously.  Having already established a practice as a sex therapist, Charles correctly foresaw that he would need all the legitimacy he could get to best serve his outsider clientele, even though he claims not to have foreseen the approaching tsunami of financial services colonization of mental health.  In 1991 Charles took the plunge into medical training.  Since his completion of his medical residency in 1994, Charles has maintained a medical practice as an internist and primary care physician in San Francisco.

As of 1997, about when I first met Charles at AASECT Charles had yet to publish on the weaknesses of the DSMs and the weaknesses in the American Psychiatric Associations case for pathologizing consensual kinks.  In his essay for a collection of the personal journeys of professional Sexologists, How I got Into Sex https://www.amazon.com/How-Got-into-Sex-Criminologists/dp/1573921157,   Charles described becoming a leading expert on sadomasochism, the Director of Research at IASHS, and had a thriving practice as an internist serving a sexually diverse community without having decided to commit his knowledge to challenging Krafft-Ebing’s orthodoxy of 115 years earlier.  Several changes mobilized him.

In 1997, NCSF was founded conjointly by the TES, SOJ, GMSMA, and the National Leather Association.  Two years later, Charles served as a consultant to NCSF.  Among its missions, NCSF sought to destigmatize consensual kink.  Charles was a natural fit with NCSF’s desire to do that using scientific argument and evidence.

In 2000, The American Psychiatric Association issued an update of their DSM-IV, the DSM -IVTR, which left most of their diagnostic categories unchanged, including those covering the paraphilias, thus dispelling hopes they would make these diagnoses less pathologizing without increased pressure from outside advocacy.

In 2001, the first representative sample studies began to emerge suggesting that many psychiatric assumptions about sexual variance were overly pathologizing kink.   Charles’ study found most kinksters were happy with their sexual interests, a finding inconsistent with the American Psychiatric Association’s stance.  Although those he studied were not sick or depraved, they constituted a sample of kinky volunteers.   Like Stoller’s informants, it was not possible to know if they were representative of the larger population of Americans engaged in kinky behaviors.   Following J Richters et al (2008) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2008.00795.x as series of studies explicitly evaluated the mental health of kinky subjects using the Neuroticism Scale of The Big Five Personality scale.  Other studies were critical of the models pathologizing kink (Cross and Matheson (2006) to be found in https://www.amazon.com/Sadomasochism-Powerful-Pleasures-Peggy-Kleinplatz-ebook/dp/B00HRU95X4.  The first representative sample study of diverse sexual behaviors in the United States was published in 2017, but did not examine personality or mental health.

Taking over from the initial efforts of Guy Baldwin and Race Bannon, The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom had relaunched the DSM project in the late 2000s to influence the DSM review process, and in the years close to the 2013 release of DSM – 5, NCSF had talked directly with the Paraphilias Committee members about the accumulating data that the mental health of kink communities, in so far as it could be known through social surveys, looked pretty similar to that of the general population.  The Paraphilias Committee had done a thorough review of the academic literature and was well aware of these data even as the advocacy community presented them.  But so too were the Paraphilia Committee members aware of the many other social actors who presented alternate points of view that the public hoped APA would accommodate.  For all the disclosure, there is an irreducible opacity in just how much the volume of these efforts influenced the final product.  You will just have to take my word when I suggest that the tremendous body of work the Charles Moser published played a critical role in altering the context for these discussions.  But here is the evidence from Charles own writings.  Don’t take my word for it, take his!

Charles and the DSM:

The summary that follows highlights Charles Moser’s arguments against the paraphilia sections of the DSM.  In the period between the release of DSM-IVTR in 2000, and the May 2013 release of DSM – 5 publishing date, Charles wrote 16 articles on other topics, about half of which targeted problems with other sections of the manual, including those covering sexual disorders, the proposed diagnoses of hypersexuality/compulsive sexual behavior and sex addiction which eventually were not included in DSM – 5, and on gender diagnoses.     This essay focuses of the paraphilia category itself because of its centrality to the experience of all kinky people, but these other diagnostic criticisms are important to many kinksters because communities overlap, and much BDSM involves gender play.

In 2001, Charles began his direct attack on the DSM in Paraphilia: A Critique of a Confused Concept. http://tempik.webzdarma.cz/literatura/parmoser/.  In it he thoroughly deconstructed the assumptions behind the concept of paraphilia as represented in the DSM.  The core of his argument was that medicine and sexology knew so little about the etiology of heterosexual, homosexual, or variant sexual interests that there was no basis for handling these sexual interests differently in the manual.  Sexual interests were some more frequent than others, but extremely variable throughout the contemporary human population and throughout history, with no intrinsic basis for declaring some troublesome and others benign even though some more directly led to reproductive consequences. This was tacitly acknowledged by the APA when the DSM stopped pathologizing homosexuality, which had originally been classified with the perversions by Krafft-Ebing precisely because of its inevitable consequences on reproduction.  If homosexuality was no longer a disease, why then were less common or less popular sexual interests still pathologized?

Charles answered his own question by analyzing the process and dynamics of how clinicians define variant sexual interests as mental disorders.  This process relies on the subjective opinions of clinicians.  No matter how ‘scientific’ the procedure for comparing the agreement between diagnosticians might be, calling for them to make a subjective estimate of pathology that was lacking a solid basis in scientific evidence was faulty science. The current nosology reflected heterosexual bias and privileged social assumptions of normality on a conventionalist basis. 

When it came to science, the paraphilia category had no clothes.  Although back in 1980, John Money had appropriated Wilhem Stekel’s language ‘paraphilia’ or ‘strange love’, in the chimerical contraction of Latin and Greek, to rescue the diagnoses from the obvious stigma of the previous term; “sexual deviation” — the language in DSM’s I and II — the paraphilia language had become stigmatizing due to the inherent unscientific assumptions of the psychiatric profession itself! There was no good science linking the paraphilias together such that they inevitably co-occurred or profited from the same treatment, and it was unclear, when such interests were presented as ‘ego-dystonic’ or unwanted that the reasons were intrinsic to the preferences, rather than real or imagined discrimination based upon social stigma.  In fact, Moser argued, it was unclear that the sexual variations were diseases at all.  By showing that the diagnostic manual reserved to the clinicians’ subjective opinions the critical diagnostic question of whether a sexual interest was a problem, Charles had APA in a trap.  With the recognition that all such decisions were subjective in their application, they lacked a scientific basis. Yet what is the purpose of a diagnostic category if it does not reserve to the clinician the basis for conferring a diagnosis on the basis of their expert knowledge as professionals?

Charles proposed an alternative diagnosis, Sexual Interest Disorder, which had the advantages of not being biased in favor of heterosexuality, and making few unsubstantiated assumptions about content, causality, or treatment.   In 2002, in support of Richard Greene, one of the principal APA members involved in de-pathologizing homosexuality, Charles attacked APA claim that its paraphilia diagnoses were empirically based and culturally sensitive.   In fact, behaviors that the DSM-IVTR pathologized were culturally accepted in other societies and times, and, like Green’s argument about pedophilia, didn’t meet the scientific requirement for being called a mental disorder.  What APA really meant by being evidence-based was that a behavior could be coded reliably, not that it proved a disease process was present.  Worse yet, by labeling such desire the disorder, the clinician was distracted from finding the true cause of the presenting problem, which might have little to do with the paraphilic behavior.  In that way, lifestyle choices, impulse problems, relationship conflict or affect regulation were ignored as possible causes of distress in favor of the notorious symptoms.  In addition, as with pedophilia, psychiatry was encouraging confusion about the difference between criminal conduct and mental disorder.  Despite the advantages of parsimony and greatly reduced bias and stigma, the Sexual Interest Disorder saw no discussion in the DSM – 5 review process.

In 2005, Moser and Peggy Kleinplatz took the diagnostic criteria for the paraphilias and applied them to heterosexuality.  As described in the DSM, heterosexuality would be a mental disorder using these criteria.  It “1) persisted over a period of six months or more with intense sexually arousing fantasies interest or behaviors involving sex with an adult of the other sex, and 2) was acted upon with a non-consenting person or fantasies, urges or sexual behavior had caused clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”  The authors admit that the DSM provides some differentiation for the paraphilias in that these interests are different from non-pathological uses of sexual interests and behaviors, but provides no criteria whatsoever, let alone research-based criteria for deciding which are pathological and which are not.  Moser and Kleinplatz conclude that diagnostic criteria that could pathologize everybody hardly constitute the basis for a sound diagnostic system.  https://docx2.com/wp-content/uploads/Does-heterosexuality-belong-in-the-DSM_.pdf

In 2006, Moser and Kieinplatz commandeered an entire issue of the Journal of Homosexuality No. 50 vol2/3 to assemble the best anthology of academic papers to date on BDSM and published this simultaneously as a book: SM: Powerful Pleasures.  In addition to Charles and Peggy’s own work, the volume contained excellent articles evaluating pathologizing psychological models of kink, extending the battles over the DSM to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO).  This was covered in an article by Odd Riersøl and Svein Skeid in which the Nordic countries eventually removed the consensual paraphilias from their national diagnostic systems.  As of this writing in Spring of 2021, large portions of Western Europe have followed suit when WHO recommended removal in ICD-11 in 2017.  The volume also includes Margie Nichols excellent article on “Psychotherapeutic Issues with ‘Kinky Clients: Yours and Theirs”.

In When is an Abnormal Sexual Interest a Mental Disorder, Charles explored the cultural biases inherent in differentiation hebephilia from pedophilia using the same criticisms that he had used on the criteria for the consensual paraphilias.  Of crucial relevance is the same conundrum of post DSM-III diagnosis:  If psychiatrists can establish reliability and reproducibility of a diagnostic differentiation, but lack either a clear disease process or an effective course of treatment, does it make sense to call the behavior a mental disorder?   In fact, human desire differences are highly variable relative to our norms, our treatments, and our own personal preferences.  It is an invitation to misdiagnosis and excessive pathologizing of behavior to imply an interest is diseased when it is merely socially undesirable, or even criminal.

In 2010, Richard Krueger, a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Paraphilias Committee auditioned the probable language the sexual sadism and sexual masochism sections of the DSM in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Also In 2010, in The Problem of Ascertainment, Charles reponded to Kruger’s proposals by extending the application of the criticism of cultural bias to the proposed language changes for DSM- 5 that would pathologize only those paraphiles whose variant interests were the source of clinically significant distress or impairment.  Citing APA’s wise decision to drop it’s ‘Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality’ diagnosis back in 1987, Moser argued that the APA had de facto created non-pathological homosexuality.   Jack Drescher had then argued that the APA would have risked cultural bias and further marginalization to claim that other marginalized groups such a as blacks or religious minorities had specific pathologies based on psychological discomfort over their race: ‘Ego dystonic race disorder, or Mormonism: ‘Ego-Dystonic Religious Disorder’!  While such discomfort surely merited clinical attention, it was not properly focused on the race or religion themselves, but the discomfort and its significance.  Calling transvestism a paraphilia because it was distressing improperly directed us to pathologize the crossdressing, rather than the source of discomfort about it.  This is stigmatizing because it led away from targeting the stigma and toward problematizing the variant sexual interest.

In 2011, Moser teamed up with A W Shindel in ‘Why are the Paraphilias Mental Disorders?’ to criticize the reasons advanced by APA for retaining the paraphilia section.  These included:

Because of a small number of serious injuries or deaths associated with the activity:

                Moser and Shindel argued that this would justify making skiing, hunting, and bicycling mental disorders.  Also, heterosexual and homosexual activities carry STI consequences for far more people but are not specifically pathologized.

To facilitate further research:

Despite the dearth of research on these topics for decades?

For those distressed by their interests or practices: 

                Other diagnoses carry these benefits without inviting the risk of error of identifying the sex practice itself as the primary cause of the clients’ concerns.

For use in forensic cases:

                This should argue for a higher, not a lower standard of scientific evidence and clinical intervention than now exists.

To differentiate extreme forms of sadism and masochism from benign or mundane forms that are part of ‘normal’ sexual expression:

                Given psychiatry’s poor history with masturbation, nymphomania, and homosexuality, why persist in this type of error?  Psychiatry lacked a track record of successfully making that differentiation.

To provide a diagnostic label for those who persist in doing these activities with non-consenting partners:

                Any sexual activity can be non-consensual.  What differentiates these nonconsensual behaviors is the lack of consent, not the variant nature of the behaviors.

Moser and Shindel concluded that the upcoming DSM – 5 should drop all the paraphilias from the forthcoming edition because of failure to meet the APA avowed commitment to make all diagnostic criteria evidence-based.

The last paper Charles published before The DSM – 5 was released in May of 2013 thoroughly deconstructed a new definition of paraphilia from Ray Blanchard and Richard Kruger that attempted to salvage the original intent of Krafft-Ebing, and later Freud, to keep the essence of what was diseased about paraphilias focused upon their defects as alternatives to coitus.  This strategy was rather anachronistic, as falling world fertility rates and advances in the effectiveness of contraception had greatly diminished the percentage of the world’s sexual acts as reproductively intended, whether they were normophilic, paraphilic, or anywhere in between.   Rather than repeat Charles arguments, suffice it to say the official final version of the paraphilia definition in the DSM – 5 showed a great deal of the Paraphilia Committees influence despite all of Moser and his colleagues sound criticisms.

Charles even managed a critical letter in Psychiatric Times co-published with Allen Frances, MD, the distinguished head of the DSM – IV revision effort who had become a critic of the DSM – 5 processes.  In it, Charles called for evidence-based utility ratings for the more outmoded and less well-researched portions of the diagnostic manual.   While Dr Frances was reserved about the feasibility and political will for such an effort, he agreed with Moser about the potential enhanced utility and validity of such an ideal manual.   Suffice it to say, with the release of the DSM – 5 in May of 2013, none of these ideas were implemented.

When Charles reviewed the newly released copy of the DSM -5, his initial analysis of the text was that his, and the criticisms of advocates and others that Zucker and First discussed in the DSM roadshow, had had little effect.  Certainly, even a casual reading of this essay provides an abundance of justification for Charles’s dissatisfaction at the impact of his work on the diagnostic process over the previous two decades.  But the new text did explicitly provide that sexual variations as described in the DSM, were not mental disorders if they were not troubling to the client and were not conducted with non-consenting partners. 

This sounds like story of futility, but Charles, who always insisted that our conclusions be evidence-based, was in for a surprise when we at NCSF documented a sharp decline in requests for our help in child custody cases as the legal system applied the implications of the new text that a kinky parent was not automatically unfit simply because they had expressed interest in or engaged in variant sexual behaviors.  It could no longer be argued they were unfit due to their kink being proof of a mental disorder! The Krueger articles in 2010 in The Archives of Sexual Behavior in which the revisions for DSM-5 were first proposed had empowered NCSF’s Incident Reporting and Review (IRR) Process to offer the articles as a resource to be used in defense to kinky people who turned to us for legal support in child custody hearings.  That flip from DSM-IVTR to the DSM – 5 text had caused a 30% decrease in child custody requests from NCSF year over year in 2010.  In addition, in all of the 51 cases in which we provided the proposed DSM paraphilia guidelines during 2011, the contested custody proceedings were dropped when we provided the proposed language changes.  And these IRR data were gathered in the 2010 -2012, the three years between the proposed text changes and the final version was published!   Last year (2020) NCSF had just 9 requests for help in child custody cases, relative to the baseline of 125 in 2008!  And that is just the tip of the iceberg in cases we know anything about because kinky defendants sought NCSF help!  The evidence is in that the changes Charles Moser and others worked to implement did have concrete and measurable reduction in discrimination against people in the kink lifestyles.

In June of 2013, hard on the heels of the American Psychiatric Association’s publishing of the fifth edition of their indispensable Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Mental Disorders, APA members Kenneth Zucker, PhD and Michael First, MD took the APA’s roadshow about the process of developing the fifth edition around to the various mental health conferences.  In June, they stopped at AASECT, and you can read my account in more detail here: https://elephantinthehottub.com/2013/07/kenneth-zucker-phd-and-michael-first-mds-dsm-5-plenary-at-aasect

In it they acknowledged the important changes in the paraphilia section of the DSM -5 and showed that that topic had received a tremendous amount of public input from clinicians, attorneys, advocates, and from altsex community members.  Despite Ken and Michael’s disclosures, the DSM process was not very transparent.  The higher levels of APA administration responsible for approval of the final wording of the manual were heavily insulated from the component content committees, and the Paraphilias Committee was not alone in having some of its work implemented and other parts altered or deleted.  Although every attempt was made By the American Psychiatric Association to put a scientific gloss on the product, the DSM was very much a political document, and this had been increasingly apparent for over 33 years of its development to that point, as the statistics upon which the diagnostic criteria were evaluated had not been released with the revisions since DSM – III in 1980.  The lack of transparency in this process makes crediting those responsible for the changes particularly difficult to identify and acknowledge.

Political though those changes were, they were the culmination of over three decades of work begun by Guy Baldwin, a clinical social worker, and Race Bannon to instigate changes in the DSM that would lead to destigmatizing kink.  That project was taken over by NCSF in 2008.  Since the publication of DSM – 5, the consensual paraphilias, have been removed from WHO’s final ICD-11 system and many countries have adopted them.  The advocacy effort which failed to remove the consensual paraphilias from the DSM between 2000 and 2020 may feel like a failure.  Most of the language is still there and the criticisms Charles was the formally make are still as valid as when he started his campaign twenty years ago.  But the greatness of his contribution is that he made them at all.  Many of the criticisms he had made in 2000 were valid when DSM-III came out in 1980 and no one had taken the professional risks to make those arguments earlier.

Since 2013 Charles has written about three articles a year including a few thorough criticisms of the many flaws in the DSM – 5 paraphilias definitions.  In the wake of the closure of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, in 2017, Charles founded the Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute.  He served as an advisor to the American Psychological Associations Div 44 Consensual Non-monogamy Task force in their successful effort to create CNM Treatment Guidelines.  And he has been a key contributor to the creation of Treatment Guidelines for Kinky Clients.  He has sponsored the 2019 Multiplicity of the Erotics (MOTE) Conference, and most prestigiously, in 2021, he was given the Sexual and Gender Revolutionary Award from the University of Minnesota’s Program in Human Sexuality.

And now, he is the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s awardee for the 2021 Race Bannon Advocacy Award for his lifetime of achievements making the world a safer place in which to be sexually different.  Thank you, Charles, for this, and the many contributions I elided to focus on your success battling stigma in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of the Mental Disorders!

Afterword:

What of Safe Sane and Consensual? 

In 1991, Act Up began a dramatic confrontational protest with the National Institutes of Health, including a mass ‘Die-In’ to represent for American and the medical community the consequences of Ronald Regan’s neglect of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.   Anthony Fauci, MD brokered the effort to make the experimental drug cocktail AZT available on an emergency basis.  It eventually became the centerpiece of an effective treatment strategy that transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic but manageable disease.  While the notion that sex could be genuinely safe was dispelled, the kink community became increasingly sophisticated about self-education and risk management.  In many ways, the kink communities are ahead of the general society in sexual risk education, negotiation, and management.

Charles Moser efforts undergirded the American Psychiatric Association’s and the World Health Organization’s definitions of diagnoses for alternative sexual behaviors.  Although much progress has been made, in 2021, TASHRA published results from The Kink Health Study conducted in 2016 which showed that slightly more than half of the kinksters they interviewed had failed to tell their doctors, and almost half had declined to tell their therapists about their kinks.  Three years after the DSM – 5 revision was published, fear of professional stigma still exceeded medical concerns that withholding this information might compromise he effectiveness of psychotherapy or medical treatment.  Through the Kink and Consensual Nonmonogamy Treatment Guidelines and the efforts of sexuality educators and therapist trainers, the effort to improve professional service to the kink community continues.

Since 1988 and the Operation Spanner Case, 22 US States have enacted revisions of their criminal codes that provide some role for consent in the laws covering criminal sexual behavior.  Not all of these provide any protection for consensual kink.  In May of 2021, the American Law Institute (ALI) passed revisions to Section 10 of their Model Criminal Code covering sexual assault. These revisions go a long way to providing real protections for kink ideals of consent in a wide range of kink behavior.  Although the ALI’s language is very commonly adopted by States, each State approves its own laws, and in the ensuing 5 months, no State has yet revised their laws on the basis of the ALI recommendations.  NCSF will be working hard on this advocacy effort over the next few years.  But where the ALI rules are adopted, consent will no longer be a sound suggestion that lacks any protection under the law.  You can follow and contribute to that effort on NCSFreedom.org.

© Russell J Stambaugh, September, 2021, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

Kink and Healing

Actor John Boyega speaking out for Black Lives Matter in London’s Hyde Park (Soapbox not pictured).

It’s soapbox time! Welcome to Hyde Park!

“Know thyself!” — Delphic maxim.

“Knowledge is Power”– Inscription on the New York Psychoanalytic Institute

“In the long run, we are all dead!”  John Maynard Keynes

“Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so!”  Hamlet, Act II scene 2.

(For those of you who have not been following this blog forever, this essay builds on ideas articulated here at many points, but especially Everything You Know is Wrong! and The Folly of Self Reports)

I hear a lot these days about how kink might be ‘healing’.

It might be.

Then again…

ANew York Governor Andrew Cuomo defending against allegations of sexual harassment.

But you will notice that lots of sex is not healing.  Andrew Cuomo is experiencing that right now. Revealing that you find it arousing to coerce your workmates into sexual conversations with your political position is not healing to your career these days.  Millions of sexual trauma survivors struggle with the fact that coercion isn’t healing. It certainly can’t be assumed that all manner of sex is healing in all contexts, even though hundreds of millions of people find it restorative and relaxing which certainly sounds lovely.


Medicine is intended to be healing.  In my case it has been life sustaining, but it ain’t necessarily so.  My friend who fasted for six hours in prep for a scan and who was told she was the victim of a scheduling error didn’t find the experience healing in the least.  But it is not just expense and administrative error that interfere with healing in medicine.  Anaphylactic shock is certainly unhealthy, yet a big enough risk of my COVID vaccination that everyone in my county is asked to wait around 15 minutes after their vaccination to preclude the very unlikely event that their protective shot might kill them!

Psychotherapy is intended as healing.  It very often is, and much in how we do therapy is explicitly intended to be healing.  But you have seen people who have had years of therapy who do things that seem less than fully healed.  We all have favorite examples.  Healing ever happens, but there is a great deal that the healing metaphor fails to accurately predict or describe.  At best, only 75-80% of psychotherapy patients get better in the bulk of evaluation studies, and many of those leave satisfied, but without all of their symptoms fully relieved.  Anyone unclear about this need only look up the work of Hans Eysenk.  Those of you who actually followed the link to “Everything You Know is Wrong’ will find a classic case study of bias in social science in Eysenk’s work on ‘cancer personality, detailed in the Wikipedia thumbnail!

On top of all my privileges which I brought to cancer treatment, I took away yet another by being a very challenging but successful case.  My cancer treatment left a very expensive legacy of iatrogenic costs, but given the poor odds of my survival, those modest but significant disabilities pale in comparison with death, the ultimate diagnosis of ill-health.  I can only imagine oncologists who see ninety percent of cases like mine die brighten when they read my chart and prepare to enter my consulting room.  I remind them of why they get up for work every morning.  I am ‘healing’ for them even as we consult to mitigate the consequences of my healing that are hard to live with.  No wonder they all seem glad to see me!


‘Healing’ is a social construction designed to give hope, and help us dispose of uncomfortable ambiguities like these. As a social constructionist — hopefully with your kind permission as a reader — I use my time on the Hyde Park soapbox to sadistically deconstruct that ideal.  Healing, my friends, is not all it’s cracked up to be.  Truth is what you need, but nevermind!


Good sex, kinky or not, can certainly be gratifying and thrilling and silly and fun.  Stripping away some of the heteronormative idealization with the entry of gay, trans, and kinky voices into the discourse has certainly broadened our understanding of what sex is.  This is far from brand new!  Sigmund Freud started that 135 years ago.  So I am distrustful of discourse that says kink isn’t sex.  Looked at this way, a lot of sex isn’t really all that sexy.  We are way beyond the idea that all sex is reproductive, or coital, or even involves intromission, or all of those good biomechanics that Masters and Johnson were at pains to point out.  So your two hour Shibari suspension in which neither you nor your rigger had an orgasm but you were transported to a blissful timeless space and he made a terrific promotional video is still probably sex in my book.  Even if you prefer to do orgasms some other time and in a completely different context.  If you drew a paycheck for it, most would call it sex work whether or not you would have done it for free.  In kink, even sexual denial serves sexual purposes!

If you can tolerate my broad and rather ambiguous definition of sex and my nasty deconstruction of healing, then perhaps you will better understand my challenge to the construction that kink might be healing.

A sex toy which is designed to prevent sex! “It is so hard to have a good time, anymore!”

  
I can only add that scientific evidence that psychotherapy is healing is somewhat ragged and ambiguous.  Given that we have professionalized psychotherapy, medicalized it, and expect people to pay good money for it, it makes sense that we should demand some proof psychotherapy is healing.  And science has provided quite a lot of evidence that psychotherapy is correlated with things we intellectually associate with healing, even if we are short of agreement on an what a good operational definition of healing ought to be.


Science has not done this evaluation for kink, or even very much for sex.  Beverly Whipple et al have a chapter in her book “The Science of Orgasm” of the health correlates of sexual activity.  They are modest but real.  Stigma, professional priorities, privacy and the rights of human subjects, problems of agreeing what sex is, prudishness, and romanticism have all posed significant obstacles to such a quixotic project for kink, so it is unsurprising to no one that there is a persistent paucity of scientific evidence that kink is healing.   Therefore there is little counterweight to claims that it is.


But I would push on into the vacuum provided by this lack of evidence with the claim that it is sex negative bias to assert that kink needs the function of healing to be defensible activity in the first place!  As DJ Williams points out, kink has many of the positive values of other forms ow serious leisure.

Ballet boots. Take a walk on the wild side?


Likewise, it is pure folly to think that Wartenberg wheels, duct tape, nipple clamps, latex hoods, diapers, furry costumes, or ballet boots that lace up all the way to your thighs are intrinsically healing.  All the sexy fetishistic trappings of kink that rivet our attention are not intrinsically healing.  Just between you and me, many of them were chosen because their associations are scary and as far from healing as our imaginations stray.  Aren’t ballet boots sexy because they are nearly impossible to walk in?  If good health means good function, ballet boots are pathologically crippling.  If Godzilla is attacking the city, no one says “Wait!  I have to lace these ballet boots on before we run for our lives!”  Indeed in response to the first draft of this essay, one of my more thoughtful respondents, Cyndi Darnell, offered, “the beautiful boots might be soothing, permission granting, liberating, validating which contribute to a sense of well-being.”  Surely these feelings are correlates of health, although I pause at the construction that such torturously constraining boots are intrinsically ‘liberating.’  One must work to make them so. To make Cyndi’s construction work, an individual must do a great deal of shadow work to get to that place of liberation.  In the meantime, the boots populate the runways and our extreme imaginations, not the athletic markets.  Even professional ballerinas do not train in them.`  Yet we agree that they are symbols of power! For a deeper dive on this See https://www.amazon.com/Fetish-Fashion-Power-Valerie-Steele/dp/0195115791  [See the first Comment by the author.]

If and when there is healing in kink, I assert that it resides in the context.  It is often absent or invisible on Porn Hub, and our favorite works of kink erotica.  It inheres instead in consent, communication, and acceptance, the not very glamorous side of ‘the life.’  Much of this instruction you could get from a psychologist or a good business trainer as easily as from a good dominatrix.


If, in kink, you can agree to anything and keep your agreement and trust others to do the same;  if you can suspend your judgment about yourself and your partner(s) and accept their fraught relationship with the things they are most afraid of judgement about outside the bedroom or dungeon, then kink might be healing.  If you can keep communicating long enough to hammer out relationships that cannot just be assumed into existence on the basis of stereotypes, then kinky criteria can form healthier relationships than vanilla assumptions routinely provide.  The inevitability of non-consensual powerplays, slut shaming, rigid gender expectations, and human inadequacies that populate conventional daily life create the opportunities for kink to be healing.  And, if they abound in daily life, how much healing can we expect kink to do?

Janet Hardy has suggested, quite properly, I think, that kink can provide training in handling intense stimulation.  This is a somewhat extreme but useful form of teaching affect tolerance, a very common healing goal in psychotherapy that never goes anywhere near the Dance of Souls!  Brad Sagarin’s work at this event at South by Southwest Leatherfest is a seminal contribution to exploring the neurophysiology of sensation play. Extreme Rituals in a BDSM Context: Altered States of Consciousness in an Extreme Ritual It is part of what Katherine Zitterbart is discussing in kink preparing her with skills for enduring chemotherapy for breast cancer.

 
Hardy also suggests that Dossie Easton’s notion that shadow play is inherently therapeutic.  As a therapist, I am neutral about this as a principle, but have seen persuasive specific instances.  Certainly thoughtful kinksters like the late Bill Henkin and Sybil Holiday have presented persuasively on this.  The general argument is that expressing one’s dark side is a crucial way of knowing it.  Usually people making this argument refer to Jungian and Freudian psychoanalytic theories which refer to the unconscious. While the Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious are quite different, and by training and personal experience, I am greatly biased towards the Freudian view, there is a long therapeutic discourse that is quite distrustful of the idea that acting on unconscious ideas is crucial to understanding them.  A central tenet of Freudian theory is that understanding and articulating one’s darkness is the key to not acting upon it! But part of that same discourse has been acutely stigmatizing of kink, and given the history pathologizing kink behaviors, the professional literature cannot be accepted uncritically.  Often therapeutic arts have been dragooned into acting as agents of social control, a problem that still plagues the modern DSM-5 in which psychiatry first formally recognized that consensual sexual variations were not inherently pathological.

  
It is hard to know how the term ‘healing’ applies when the DSM-5 characterizes nonconsensual paraphilias like pediophilia and sexual sadism which do not trouble the client but in which other people are harmed.  These are criminal conduct, not diseases, especially given that problems abound in identifying their common etiologies and treatments.  I will examine the criticisms of the paraphilia diagnosis further when I summarize the important works of Charles Moser, who has a considerable and persuasive body of work that has led to its moderation, but not removal, of the paraphilia diagnosis from the DSM-5.


Closely related to this question of kink as ‘healing’ is the work of Emily Prior, DJ Williams and Richard Sprott characterizing kink as ‘serious leisure’ analogous to rock climbing.  This analogy applies best to the vanguard of people involved in the out and intellectually active dimension of the kink community such as are likely to be reading this essay.  It is much less clear how it applies to the majority of kinksters who act on their fantasies without joining an online community, social group, or attending kink events, or learning from the extensive kink educational discourse.  But it is certainly true that the kink intelligentsia learns techniques for playing more safely and effectively and it is easy to imagine that many of them know their limits and explore their preferences more deeply from participation in kink activities within their communities in a manner much like serious climbers do.  The element of testing oneself, knowing one limits, managing risks, and self enhancement and discovery are very similar.  So concerns that acting on one’s impulses is a substitute for understanding them which have historically characterized the therapeutic community cannot be taken uncritically any more than self-reported data can.

DJ has noted that kink has other characteristics in common with serious leisure, including being freely and autonomously chosen, and being intrinsically motivated. I agree that those are positives of kink, but for either psychotherapy, or serious leisure, or idle leisure, or kink to be ‘therapeutic’, we must specify a disease for which they might be the cure. Having been historically linked to pathology, and it having taken about 130 years to officially debunk this, I am very charry of any justification for kink that resorts to curing disease. Indeed, I agree with DJ and others who think those shared criteria are quite sufficient justification for kink, but merely a good beginning for justifying calling a allied medical procedure ‘therapeutic’. I would add that becoming socialized to any community can be a wellspring of social health benefits, and the kink communities offer this in sufficient abundance that it is a genuine public health concern that when kink groups stopped face-to-face meetings due to COVID-19, groups needed to migrate online to maintain social support for their more isolated and marginalized members. The stress of COVID-19 is strongly associated with increases in domestic violence and other crimes, demonstrating the stressful effects of loss of autonomy, loss of of agency, and decreased social support for the general population. It is not unfair to imagine these are exaggerated for socially marginalized and stigmatized populations. https://elephantinthehottub.com/2020/03/sex-in-the-time-of-corona


One of the reasons kink is decades ahead of the mundane world’s operationalization of consent is that our daily lives in the larger social world do not explicitly function on consent.  Much of our behavior is incentivized to the point of coercion.  Much behavior is not accepted.  Judgement is implicit.  Ostracism is common and real.  Often we cannot imagine freedom from judgement because we are active participants in judging ourselves and others in our attempts to negotiate social life.  And nooses are left in classrooms and garages, slurs scratched on bathroom walls, tags stake out territory on walls and railway cars.  Lots of things are NSFW.  FB bans posts with sex in the title of educational posts while selling ads for PDE-5 inhibitors that emphasize how ‘hard’ you’ll get!  Credit cards won’t process your purchase from the ‘wrong’ sites.  What boundaries you can enforce is a function of your privilege.  For many, our closest relationships are too precious to risk honestly asking for what we desire.  Stigma is a social disease, albeit with very real effects on individuals, but it calls into question the construction of the term ‘healing; the dis-ease is societal. Rock climbers may face dangers that cause potential partners to recoil in fear, but no one blocks their websites or declares rock climbing a public health crisis.


You will note that many of the ground rules of good psychotherapy: informed consent, honesty, being freely and autonomously chosen, suspension of judgment, learning about self and others, intimacy, and intense communication are the crucial ingredients of effective kinky relationships.  So the question of whether kink might be healing might be the starting point of a sales job to get you to sign up for something you aren’t ready for.  Or it might just be true. The Science of BDSM team at NIU isin the process of investigating the physiology that kinksters are activating in role play and intense stimulation. This is a far cry from proving kink is a form of therapy, but there are individuals who claim to use kink for pain and emotional management. I have no doubt that these are honest and thoughtful accounts, but anecdotes suggest that a thing is possible even if they fall well short of scientific proof.

In the meantime, be aware that the famous PDE-5 inhibitors used to treat erectile dysfunction have well documented physiological mechanisms and have passed high scientific hurdles in Western medical societies that heavily regulate medicines. Yet they only work about 40% of the time, and the vast majority of prescriptions are not renewed.


Be advised, therapy is hard work…


And O’s journey into sublime submission might be easier to write about than to actually do.  Kinkyfolk are not readily dissuaded by the notion that kink might be hard sometimes. If kink is healing sometimes for some people, perhaps their choices are a little less coerced in kink than in mundane living despite all the colorful trappings of power exchange.


© Russell J Stambaugh, March, 2021, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

The 2020 Consent Survey Technical Report

Im 2019 Susan Wright and I designed and implemented the 2020 Consent Survey with the help of our excellent research partners at UNC Charlotte. This is a follow up to the 2014 Consent Violations survey, specifically looking at consent incidents and psychological resilience. In February, as our communities started to experience distress due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we concluded data gathering out of concern for stressful nature of the content for some participants. This technical report summarizes some of our primary findings:

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s New Consent Guidelines

After a thorough review by NCSF’s relevant committees, the Consent Counts Committee has proposed, and the Board has approved our Best Practices for Consent to Kink.

https://ncsfreedom.org/2021/01/16/best-practices-for-consent-to-kink/

These are guidelines, not hard and fast rules.   Many seasoned kinksters have house rules, informal agreements and contracts that differ from these.  Perfect adherence to these guidelines does not completely prevent misunderstandings, accidents, or even predatory behavior.  But we have revised them after an extensive cooperative effort with The American Legal Institute (ALI) to use language that is consistent with their new Model Criminal Code, which serves as a template for the 50 US States to revise their criminal statutes.  While States implement the Model Criminal Code individually, and often modify it in parts, in each State which chooses to pass it, it will for the first time implement consent as a criterion for determining assault and sexual assault that its largely consistent with kink community practices.  This is a huge advance relative to historical statues that often did not provide any role for consent in determining if a crime had been committed. 

The ALI has yet to finally approve the Model Criminal Code due to COVID-19’s disruptive impact on their meetings, and until it receives final approval, no States have yet to adopt it.  It is a major goal of NCSF to encourage its adoption over the next several years.  You can assist this process by your donation of time or money through the NCSFreedom.org website by clicking on “How to Get Involved”.  You are also encouraged to download this file for use in you group of you may request brochures from NCSF on our website.

With the full understanding that consent is contextual, and there are many ways of communicating it, we think these guidelines provide the best possible protection against legal liability and are a great starting point in new relationships and novel party settings.  Please stay safe and have fun!

Touch: “A Taste of Kink”

What is Taste of Kink?  It is an educational program run twice at AASECT, Annual Conference in Minneapolis and again in Denver.  A three-hour fundraiser for AASECT, it conferred three continuing education credits (CE’s) that count towards AASECT Certification and other professional licensing requirements.  The program consisted of participants contracting to see and possibly experience a “taste” of kink activities by signing a waiver, in much the same manner that kink social group members do when they attend kink social events.  Six or seven teams of experienced kink educators  model for the trainees how to negotiate and obtain consent for a specific kink activity, as well as answering questions about the demo and their lifestyles.  At almost all of the stations, trainees had the opportunity to experience a sample version of the kink activities if they formally negotiated and agreed to do so.  Example stations included bootblacking, hot wax play, flogging, spanking, puppy play, bondage, foot worship, and violet wand play, all in the context of negotiation, rehearsing their safe words, a brief experience of the activity, and aftercare.  AASECT Certified Members served as safeties to observe the activities, answer additional questions, and support participants who might become uncomfortable with any feelings that were provoked by the sessions.

History:  The original title and design for the educational program “Taste of Kink” were Susan Wright’s work.  In the decade before the publication of the Fifty Shades novels, there was a misconception that BDSM was painful and nonconsensual. Professionals always asked: Why do people do BDSM? What does it feel like that people want to do it? To educate professionals and interested novices in the LGBTQ and allied communities, the local kink groups wanted to put on programs  that showed what BDSM was, and the idea was to provide a smorgasbord of light interactive demos that provided training on how to negotiate consent and gave a nonthreatening overview of kinky experiences.  Many kink local groups routinely program advanced demos that were perfect for their regular clientele, while a program like Taste of Kink might attract curious people to those locally produced efforts.  

In 2012, the AASECT Annual Conference team for the meeting in Austin arranged for a nonmember presenter to give an introduction to BDSM as a breakout session.  This presenter, not being familiar with AASECT CE rules and policies, decided at the last minute that her presentation would be amplified with a demo.  Despite failing to describe these plans in the conference program, she recruited a sympathetic conference goer to stage this demo, and presented it.  Her session was jammed with attendees, overfilling the space and surrounding her presentation area.  The presenter and her assistant graciously volunteered to be photographed by the numerous smart phones in attendance.  When the assistant took off her top, a Board Member in the audience left to deal with the emergency, and an intern who was helping administer session logistics retreated to the front desk to complain she was seeing violence in an AASECT conference presentation.  The presenter had not only unwittingly violated AASECT CE protocol by deviating from her program description, but she had invited people to film, and potentially to post pictures of the action on social media in ways that might have put conference attendees, who had not given consent to be photographed, at risk of problems at work or at home, let alone failing to secure AASECT’s consent to any of these missteps.  

Susan and I were involved in helping AASECT craft a positive response to this incident that minimized stigma.  Needless to say, many of the ways this particular session was done violated the kinds of contracting that are typical in many BDSM social groups.  With the exception of the Folsom Street Fair, photos are typicall and very strictly forbidden.  In many venues, smartphones are an unwelcome intrusion.  We suggested that with resources available like the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group (AltSex SIG) and NCSF, which had access to experienced kink educators, it should not be necessary for AASECT to bring outside presenters in on this topic.  Why not use people who knew AASECT’s culture and training needs?  

Thereafter, Susan and I were in continual conversation with successive Annual Conference planning teams.  But it took several years to get a conference where we had adequate site and local educator resources available.  Because AASECT’s Code of Ethical Conduct prevents this sort of touch between AASECT members, we could not have AASECT members providing the education for each other.  Some AASECT supervisors also might have supervisory relationships with potential participants and such conduct would vilolate their supervision agreements.  Although the official policy of AASECT was supportive of BDSM education, not all members shared these open views and trainees would have realistic reasons to be concerned about what some other members might think.  And worries of this sort were a distraction from our educational objectives for such a session even if we could overcome them.  So we decided upon an initial event that required a convenient off-site location and experienced kink educators and professionally trained safeties from the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group who were also sophisticated about BDSM practices.  Understanding AASECT’s culture and kink lifestyles, they would be in an excellent position to support any AASECT participants who might have questions or conflicts during the event. 

BDSM as Social Organization in Monterey:  In 2013, we thought we had these elements assembled in Monterey California.  We were near a very strong community in San Francisco and had a bondage B&B in the community that might provide an offsite location.  I went to Monterey for a site visit.   Sometimes my work requires sacrifices!  Unfortunately, the B&B was in a rural subdivision 40 minutes away from our conference site, and a large group of attendees could not be bussed there in a timely manner and without creating a disturbance in the neighborhood.  We dropped our plans for Taste of Kink in Monterey and did “Kink as Social Organization” instead, bringing the B&B operators, Jim Volcelka and Montaine; the head of Folsom Street Events Demetri Moshoyannis; Richard Sprott, Director of CARAS;  Anna Randall as a representative of TASHRA, Janet Hardy author of several classic books and principal of Greenery Press; and Race Bannon, founder of the Kink Aware Professionals List for a panel about organizations that serve the kink communities.  That was attended by 120 people, and was highly rated, awarded two CE’s for each attendee, and generated about $10,000.00 for AASECT

Kink as Social Organization, AASECT Annual Conference, Monterey, California
Left to Right: Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Presenter, Jim Vocelka and Mointaine, owners of Monterey Stay and Play B&B; Anna Randall of TASHRA and CARAS, Janet Hardy, author and publisher of Greenery Press; Richard Sprott, Director of TASHRA and CARAS; Race Bannon, founder of the Kink-Aware Professionals List, Demetri Moshoyannis, Executive Director of Folsom Street Events; and (in back) Neal Cannon, PhD, Presenter.

Taste of Kink I in Minneapolis, 2016:  We finally had good offsite space and highly professional educational resources in place in Minneapolis and we ran the first Taste of Kink at club space.  We jammed 100 participants in for three hours.  The local group provided hors d’oeuvres, SportSheets provided gift bags, and 6 different stations offered tastings which were gingerly taken advantage of by a minority of participants.  The feedback we got was intense, and very positive.  It ranged from a couple of AASECT veterans who thought it was all old hat, they had seen it before in the 1970s; to participants who cried they were so overcome that AASECT had taken kink seriously enough to allow the presentation.  There were a few problems, too.  Although everyone praised the care and concern in the program design, some wanted to play but felt too inhibited because senior members were present, and they could not let themselves go in public space (which was fine in this case since “play” was not the point of the event).  However this is an issue for many professionals who can’t participate in local kinky social organizations, so it is far from unreasonable.  Also, one AASECT member saw fit to get partly naked during her tasting, which we had not seen fit to prohibit, but it raised eyebrows.  Some of the educators who modeled how to receive the activities were naked because it was consistent with how they typically play.  Overall, the safeties had little to do, of the 100 participants, many had questions, only one wanted to leave early.  But that was a logistical problem, it being dark outside and a mile walk back to the conference hotel.  This imposed an inconvenience that might dissuade uncomfortable participants from leaving if they felt they had to.  Mostly the safeties served as co-facilitators, explaining things when the educators were busy.  But this led to the objection that the safeties were too senior and so ubiquitous that they inhibited some people from tasting because of their possible power relationships with general participants.  The event was run as a fundraiser for AASECT generating about $5,000 for AASECT less the rental charges for the club.  NCSF and a private donor covered AASECT expenses for the buses.  3 AASECT CE’s were generated for most of the 100 participants.

Cap’n Dubrovnik casts his baleful presence over the ballroom immediately before the Denver Taste of Kink. We have no photos of the event consistent with the policies outlined at the end of this post. The captain lost his boat long ago, but in Denver, we were nowhere near navigable water. Of course, navigation has been surprisingly challenging for The Captain!

Taste of Kink II, Denver, 2018: On the basis of that feedback, Susan I accepted the 2018 Annual Conference team’s invitation to repeat a Taste of Kink in Denver.  Again, we had access to experienced kink educators in the local area. Susan and I thought that transportation had been a problem for anyone who might have wanted to leave early, and we addressed this by having the event at the conference hotel.  The Denver Marriott Downtown had a free ballroom well-segregated from the main AASECT event, so it would be easy for educators to off load their equipment, set up and leave without disturbing other hotel patrons with their garb or gear.  We used different people as safeties from the AltSex SIG in hopes of not only giving more SIG members a chance to contribute, but to create opportunity for participants who felt inhibited last time to taste without the same safeties on hand.  

Sportsheets Inc. graciously provided this lovely goodie bag to each participant at Taste of Kink I and II!

We invited Neil Cannon to serve as master of ceremonies because I had health difficulties one month prior to the event that might have precluded my participation.  Happily, I proved healthy enough to co-facilitate. Everyone signed the same waivers that had been used successfully at a Taste of Kink in Denver, and we devoted somewhat less time to going over them in favor of more time for attendees to experience each station.  We got some feedback that more time should have been devoted to consent discussion.  SportSheets again provided lovely gift bags (pictured below), and requested that we use their products in a demo, but we declined this request out of a desire to have the educational content free of any commercial considerations.  They independently arranged a hospitality suite which they opened after the event, but was not endorsed or monitored by the program team.  

During the 2017 Annual Conference, the Denver Marriott raised objections to the event, and it required a frenzy of last-minute negotiations with the Board and Annual Conference team to avoid a cancellation.  One of the late arising requirements was no nudity.  Susan and I took responsibility for informing the educators, who had not been told that nudity was off limits in their contracting with us prior to the event.  All the educators agreed to this revision, but some of their teammates arrived late to the orientation session which had to be repeated and one sub took her top off late in the event, so partial nudity was present in the last 10 minutes of the event in violation of our agreement with AASECT.  One trainee left early, troubled by something, but declined to discuss her concerns with the safeties, Susan, Neil or myself.  And once again, the event garnered great participant reviews, generated a potential of 360 CEs for AASECT members, and grossed $24,000 for the AASECT general fund in exchange for modest room and setup expenses.  NCSF organized the presenters with compensation for parking due to the logistical expenses of bringing their equipment, but no professional fees.

No event in Philadelphia,  2018:  The Annual Conference team was immediately enthusiastic, and plans were drawn up to present in 2018 in Philadelphia.  Ruby Bouie Johnson and Susan recruited educators who are peoples of color from Philadelphia under the same terms as in Denver, with the addition of a small stipend to be paid to each of the educators by AASECT.  In the interim, the new Board of Directors met and passed the objectionable policy against continuing education credit for educational programs that included educational touch.  The Taste of Kink producers, now including Susan, Ruby and myself were not informed of this policy until December.  We objected to changing the agreement which had worked perfectly well in previous events.  First we were told the policy was only being tentatively proposed, but that employing consensual educational touch might increase liability.  The Philadelphia educators  refused to re-negotiate their agreement with AASECT on terms that were different than the previous predominantly white educator teams in Denver and Minneapolis.  AASECT persisted in the misconception that Taste of Kink could be run with a one hour didactic presentation on consent, for which one CE would be awarded, and participants would be on their own to attend demonstrations for the latter two hours.  This led to their claim that they had not cancelled Taste of Kink and wished to proceed.  In fact, AASECT President Susan Stiritz was informed within a week of the notice  that AASECT was going to enforce its new CE policy that AASECT had thereby cancelled a Taste of Kink.  

In the midst of listserv discussions about this dispute, an AASECT member came forward in support of the Board’s decision, indicating that she had been sexually harassed at Taste of Kink and had left.  I do not know for sure that she is the same person who I knew to have left during the Denver event.  It is hardly surprising that she had not informed the event team of this event, Susan and I are aware from our 2014 Consent Violations Survey that only about a quarter of people who experience consent violations actually go to event staff with complaints, and only a minority of those who do are satisfied by the event staff’s responses.  Although Susan Stiritz seemed nonplussed when this revelation did not change NCSF’s willingness to renegotiate the design of Taste of Kink, it hardly constituted a basis for so doing.  Taste of Kink already had language in its waiver that was more strict than the general AASECT behavioral guidelines routinely included in AASECT Conference Program.  We did not have then, and do not have now, any evidence that this incident had anything to do with the educational touch guidelines of Taste of Kink, nor were we informed of it in a manner that would have enabled us to address it during the event itself.  This does not mean that we do not take it seriously, but that is not a matter of educational policy or even event design.

Given that AASECT may well be correct in refusing to grant CE for some programs employing consensual educational touch, it is worth considering why Susan and I used it in Taste of Kink.

Certainly, the perceived demand for such a program among AASECT trainees was part of our motivation, and Susan’s success running a Taste of Kink for non-kinky audiences was the starting point for our design.  But several other design considerations were even more important.

Intended Audiences:

Our target audiences were primarily AASECT members who were not already members of existing kinky communities, for whom the activities were already likely to be well understood and familiar.   We were especially interested in programming for people who would not have the nerve to go to a kink social club or national event because of issues of professionalism, personal safety and community reputation.  Here was a safe place where such material could be encountered without the risks of encountering embarrassed friends, colleagues or clients.   A secondary population was AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group who did not need instruction in basic kink activities, but who wanted to be able to use their expertise to educate and support AASECT members who are not so sophisticated about the content.

Design Objectives:

First, although seeing actual kink behavior was a popular draw, in the days of PornHub and a host of on-line video educational programs, neither Susan nor I thought that merely showing behaviors that kinky people do was a sufficient design objective.  Some kink behaviors were too upsetting and extreme to demonstrate.  Others were too complicated and lengthy to do in the time allotted.  And while the opportunity to question BDSM lifestyle participants was a definite objective of Taste of Kink that was well met by the actual design, it was easy for AASECT trainees to get such a training experience at other places.  

Second, the educational touch had to occur in the realistic context of consent, negotiation, play and aftercare that characterizes play between casual friends and strangers at kink clubs.  This modeled consent in an interactive setting and de-sensationalized aspects of play.  In a situation in which privileged professionals get to view the behavior of marginalized subcultural denizens, there is plenty of opportunity for further marginalizing of the educators.  The design we created discourages objectification and promotes curiosity, empathy and equality.

Third, in so far as curious and excited AASECT participants experienced apprehension and caution about playing, they were in an excellent position to empathize with clients and their own students, who experienced kink negotiation in much the same way.  It is partly for this reason that we have been little persuaded that it is improper for AASECT members to do this in front of one another despite obvious status and power differences within the AASECT community.  This condition is characteristic of kink communities too, and drives home a seriousness and vulnerability that is very characteristic of kink consent.

Fourth, by providing light activities that feel differently than they look, people are able to recognize that their assumptions about kink might not be right, and that kink is often theatrical and psychological, not just a matter of technique, costume or equipment.  Challenging assumptions is in and of itself destigmatizing.

And fifth, we felt that AASECT fully accrediting this event (and later, having it in their own space, rather than off-site) was destigmatizing of touch, kink, sex, and the process of educating about it, one of NCSF existential goals. 

It is, I think, obvious from the statement of these positives not only why we are adamantly opposed to AASECT’s stigmatizing CE policy, but also why we do not think that a one hour consent lecture and freedom to roam a bunch of kinky demonstrations is an acceptable substitute design.  And frankly, believing that, we think very little of any AASECT official who would propose this.  AASECT is here to amplify our abilities as educators, not diminish them.

All of this is not to suggest that Taste of Kink is already in a perfect state, and requires no improvements.  We still wish that a safer place for demonstrations could be provided where people who were uncomfortable playing under the gaze of others could be accommodated.  We still have yet to run a Taste of Kink that was fully diverse with respect to race.  Frankly there are important but secondary reasons to defend nudity in these events.  Nudity is about vulnerability for kink participants and AASECT trainees alike, and makes the consent context more realistic, even when AASECT participants cannot get naked themselves.  Because participants might be triggered, it is necessary that they be allowed to leave without sacrificing their CEs, lest they feel excessively compelled to stay.  While only two or three people seem to have left two events serving over 220 people, it is objectionable to offer credit for a program that is not fully attended.  This is a genuine requirement of CE reciprocity with APA and other professional bodies.  Barring 220 people from profiting from a program for the needs of three people is not proportionate or consistent with our educational mission.  Finally, it may not be sex positive or good advocacy, but AASECT needs to be able to fully comply with its contractual obligations to its conference hotels.  If they cannot be relied upon to permit legitimate AASECT training programs, other meeting space needs to be obtained, and the needs of the many are better served with off-site space where such trainings can be safely conducted.

Note that I have not suggested changes to discourage sexual harassment.  Taste of Kink is not, in its present form, as conducive to sexual harassment even to the degree that general AASECT sessions are.  I have included the Taste of Kink waiver participants were required to sign, and ask if that isn’t more of a guarantee than most AASECT programs offer?  It is important to recognize that behavior defined as harassment occurs in a larger social context, is already regarded as personal deviance, and one or even more episodes of it do not inherently reflect a defect in organizational culture or in specific program design.  Taste of Kink did not provide any way for AASECT Members to taste kink with one another.  So it is a misunderstanding of the program design and execution to suggest the harassment was a likely product of the design.

I belabor this at length for two very serious reasons.  In the wake of AASECT November 2018 Board meeting, AASECT has instituted policies that are damaging not just to BDSM education, but to all activities that involve touch, including Tantra, massage, sex work, erotica, live clinical demonstrations and other potentially safe and valuable learning experiences for professionals who society legitimately expects to be experienced, sophisticated and tolerant of diverse personal expression.  If AASECT is not promising that, what exactly are we offering the public?   The AASECT policy marginalizes much more than kink.  Secondly, AASECT saw fit to specifically regulate, and thus chose to reinforce stigma not just about touch but about BDSM and nudity specifically.  This offers AASECT no real protection if the ban is not evidence-based, and AASECT has no such evidence.  If these things are appropriate to program objectives and those objectives are consistent with the AASECT mission, they need to be approved.  Barring any consensual behavior regardless of context is stigmatizing overreach and a retreat from full professionalism. 

I have presented Tate of Kink’s design and history in detail not to defend it.  It is fine and AASECT even still wants it.  I have fought AASECT’s policy to protect AASECT.  It turns out that from the viewpoint of professionalism, you cannot marginalize others without marginalizing yourself.  The field of sexology needs AASECT not to do that.  We at NCSF need you not to do it, too.  Think of it as flattening the curve on social stigma.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, May, 2020, Ann Arbor, MI All rights reserved.

Materials below were written by Russell J Stambaugh, PhD and Susan Wright, MA. Permission is granted to use them as the starting point for the design of similar events. Please credit NCSF as these materials were derived from kink scene contracts and consent educational programs!

The Following are copies of the actual materials used for Taste of Kink II

A TASTE of KINK: Informed Consent

The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors & Therapists (AASECT) is pleased to present “A Taste of Kink.”  A Taste of Kink is a project led by AASECT’s, AltSex Special Interest Group and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF).  The focus of a Taste of Kink is to provide several live demonstrations of kink practices related to Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism (BDSM). The demonstrations will be led by members of the local kink communities.  The demonstrations will start with the process of communication, negotiation, and contracting for consensual adult behaviors and roleplay between the demo-bottom and the demo-top.  Various BDSM equipment and techniques will be utilized and demonstrated.  Scenes will conclude with the contracted aspects of aftercare.  Some AASECT members will have the opportunity to volunteer to sample a “Taste of Kink” at the various demonstration stations.  All parts of this demonstration will be guided by BDSM community standards of being Safe, Sane & Consensual.  3 AASECT CE Credits.

TERMS OF PARTICIPATION

I hereby agree to the following terms of participation in a Taste of Kink.

  1. I attest to the fact that I am at least 21 years of age and agree to carry with me at all times, a valid driver’s license or Government issued I.D. prior to entry to the secured area of the event sponsored by AASECT to prove my age and identity.  That the name listed on my registration is my true and valid name and not an alias.
  • I understand there will be live demonstrations of BDSM.
  • I agree and attest to the fact that I find none of these subjects or activities to be offensive or objectionable to me in any matter. I understand that some people can get triggered or have negative reactions to BDSM.  I am willing to take those risks as an adult and take full responsibility to care for myself and or get support as needed.
  • I am participating in A Taste of Kink voluntarily.  I willingly and with full consent waive and relinquish any claim, legal or otherwise, that I might make related to anything I might see or experience.
  • I understand and agree that no alcohol, marijuana, or any illegal or recreational drugs or substances of any kind may be brought into the event.
  • I understand that there is to be no nudity.  Genitals and breasts must be covered at all times. 
  • I understand and agree that if it appears I am noticeably affected by either alcohol or drugs, I will be denied admittance and or asked to leave by Security, the Executive Director of AASECT, an AASECT Conference Committee Member or AASECT Board Member.  I agree that their decision is final, and I agree to wave any registration fees that may be involved, and further I agree to wave any recourse against AASECT, its’ officials, and or its’ members.

  • I agree that by entering this event, I agree that there are emotional and physical risks inherent in BDSM activities and as such, I agree to hold harmless AASECT, its’ members, its’ officers, directors, conference committee members, or anyone else involved with a Taste of Kink. 

  • I understand and agree that no recording equipment is allowed in the event space.  If cell phones are brought in to the space as a matter of convenience, they must be turned off and remain concealed in purses, pockets, etc.  Should any audio/visual equipment, cameras or other recording devices (including cell phones and PDA devices) be observed in the Taste of Kink space, such equipment can be immediately confiscated, and all recorded data immediately destroyed. Any participant caught taking pictures or making audio or video recordings with any device will be required to leave immediately.  If the violation is by an AASECT member, further action may be taken that is consistent with other AASECT policies, procedure and ethical codes.   
  1. For those of you who must stay in contact with family members or babysitters, please leave word at the front desk of the hotel, and we will make every effort to reach you immediately.
  1. By signing this Agreement, I agree of my own free will to all terms of this agreement.
  1. Normal dungeon etiquette is required.  Do not interfere with a demonstration unless specifically invited to do so by the participants.  Do not touch any other person or anyone’s possessions without permission.  Please limit all conversation, comments and other noise to a minimum in the play space.  
  1. AASECT Staff and monitors must be obeyed at all times. If you become aware of a person who is breaking the rules, please notify a roving monitor or a station monitor. If you are not sure of the rules or of regular etiquette, please ask.
  1. By your entry into a Taste of Kink you acknowledge that you have read these rules and that you understand them and will abide by them. 
  1. I understand and agree that no animals are allowed inside the Taste of Kink area. 
  1. I agree that if should I violate any section of this agreement, to the extent that I would be ejected, I agree to forfeit my registration fees to AASECT without any expectation of financial reimbursement.

By my name and signature, hereby memorialized below, I swear my complete agreement and acquiescence to all terms stated above.

NAME (printed legibly): _________________________________________________________

SIGNED: _______________________________________________________________

DATE: ___________________

WITNESS: _____________________________________________________________

DATE: ____________________

Lastest revision: 06/11/2018

Outline: Introductory Speech for A Taste of Kink II

7pm – 7:15 – Mix and mingle. Attendees are arriving and wandering among the stations, talking to the demo teams

7:15 – NELLY: WELCOME & INTRODUCTIONS

Welcome to A Taste of Kink II

Recognition and gratitude for Russell

Sponsored by the AASECT Alt Sex SIG and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom

I am Nelly Cannon, this is Susan Wright.  Russell and Susan designed this event several years ago and brought it to the AASECT annual conference in Minneapolis. 

We thank:

AASECT Board

Conference Committee

NCSF

Brian and Liz from Thunder in the Mountains.

The local demonstrators and DMs from the Denver kink community

AASECT Station Monitors

Volunteers from the Alt Sex SIG

This is fundraiser for AASECT that has raised more than $15,000.  The money will be used for…

We are getting 3 CE’s for this event.

Brief introduction to play…

The structure of a scene is as follows:

Consent

Contracting/negotiating

Safewords

Play

Aftercare

Tonight’s event will follow this same structure, and to begin, we will all make sure we understand what we are consenting to, and we will contract together. Then I will turn you over to Susan who will explain the mechanics of negotiation, play and the demos. When the demos are over, or you are ready to leave, you will rate the event, sign out, and collect your CE certificate. 

Housekeeping – Neil

Feel free to leave at any time, if you wish. It is our intention to create informed, ongoing consent during this event, so if you no longer wish to participate, please don’t stay.

If you are uncomfortable about anything, there are several layers of support…

Three Roving Monitors (Me, Susan and Anna).  Similar to Dungeon Monitors.

AASECT Station Monitors

Demonstration leaders, demo bottoms, and DMs from the BDSM community.

please tell me or one of the station monitors who are wearing the orange vests. These vests are very typical of a BDSM party where the DMs wear distinctive sashes so people know who they can go to for help.

Re-Introduce Susan

Susan: Consent & Negotiation

We are modeling the experience of BDSM for you in tonight’s event, so I want to make sure we’re on the same page.

Everything I’ll discuss with you about Consent and Negotiation are available on the NCSF website. Check out our Consent Statement, Power Exchange Statement, BDSM Glossary, What Professionals Need to Know about BDSM and other FAQS available on our website. We also ask you to sign up as a Kink Aware Professional, if you already haven’t done so. Please take a Got Consent? brochure from the NCSF table – it’s very useful for helping to educate people on how to negotiate and get consent.

There are a vast pool of sex educators like the good folks who have come here who are mostly volunteers who work with hundreds of BDSM groups around the country. As more people are becoming aware of BDSM and more people are accessing this education, there is more demand for it. Kink Aware Professionals are essential to our underserved population, and without a doubt, you will be seeing more opportunities for growth in the coming years in this area. 

Keep in mind tonight that consent as a professional means something different than it does in a BDSM context.

We see consent as an informed, voluntary agreement to engage in a particular BDSM activity or to enter into a BDSM, D/s or M/s relationship. Tonight we’ll be examining BDSM activities or what we commonly refer to as “scenes.” The primary points of consent are:

1. Consent is choice. If you are pressured or manipulated into doing something, you have not given consent.

2. Consent is informed. Everyone involved must know enough so that the consent is given on an informed basis.

3. Consent is not a blank check.  We all have limits whether those limits are physical, mental or emotional.

4. Consent is revocable. You can withdraw consent at any time.

5. Consent is made with a sound mind, not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Consent is not the absence of a “NO,” but the mutual creation of a “YES.” To come to that mutual agreement, kinky people need to negotiate. That means they have to talk about what they want and don’t want and why. As we all know, most people don’t talk about sex even with their partners.

Negotiation in a BDSM context is agreeing:

Who is going to be involved – tonight tastings only happen between demonstrates and attendees

What kind of experience is desired – the tastings are brief and mild and power exchange is limited because of that

Where it’s okay to touch and not touch  – tonight you may have an option of different areas for stimulation, including in some cases bare skin or clothed skin. Plus, please give your preference for aftercare – a rub or hug?

When a risk of injury or a health issue needs to be considered – do you suffer from dizziness? Or have a skin issue? Tell the demo top before trying the sensation.

Why you are doing this together – the goal of the scene – tonight it is educational so that you gain insight into why and how kinky people engage in these activities.

How you stop it, whether it’s a scene or a relationship – tonight Red is the safeword and yellow means to slow down – Nelly will talk more about that under the Rules

People negotiate in a variety of different ways: on the spur of the moment, extensively through emails, through in-person discussions, or as an ongoing part of their relationship.

It is impossible to eliminate entirely the risk that the activity or relationship may turn out differently than everyone involved anticipated when consent was given. In this regard, BDSM is like many other activities—team sports, sky diving, rock climbing. This evening is no different, so everyone here is charged with personal responsibility for managing your own risks.

This is exactly why we’ve developed this kind of education, because what we do entails risk. Emotionally, physically and mentally, we are impacted by exchanging power and stimulating each other in intimate and intense ways. So we each have to protect ourselves. And we have a responsibility to teach others how to protect their health and psychological well-being.

Nelly: Rules

Our contract together tonight includes rules about how we demonstrate things here.  Some are supplied because we are an AASECT event, but most are etiquette that BDSM social groups observe when they play together.  They are a condition of everyone’s participation here, and I welcome any questions now before I ask everyone to commit to them.

Let’s start with a principle before we get to the rules.  For many people in the BDSM community, dungeon space like this is sacred.  There are rules, rituals, protocols and a spirit that runs deep in the veins of some folks.  We ask you please to be in this space with that in mind.

As for the rules, there are several and they are important so that everyone has a positive experience.  The rules are in place for your emotional and physical safety.  They are also in place to expose you to the sorts of rules your clients might encounter if they were in a dungeon.

1.         The doors will close prior to the event and nobody will be allowed entry after that point

2.         Attendees can leave at any time.  If you need to leave to use the restroom you are welcome to do that and return, however we request that you do not wander in and out any more than you absolutely have to.

3.         There is no nudity. Genitals and female breasts will be covered at all times – you may wear underwear.

4.         No touching people, or other people’s stuff without their explicit permission.

5.         Safewords are required for participation in any demo.  For tonight, everyone’s safeword is “Yellow’ and ‘Red.’  Yellow means ‘Pause and let’s discuss something.’   Red permanently stops play.  If you use your safeword, be prepared for play to stop.  It can take courage to use your safeword, not just to decline to use it.  Err on the side of safety.

6.         No loud talking laughter or distracting behavior near the demos.  It is OK to whisper and or to speak softly.

The roll of witness in the BDSM community.  Can provide energy, observation, love, support, and allowing people to be seen.

7.         No cell ringtones, no cell conversations in the demo area, and no sound recording, video recording pics or selfies. If we see a cell phone, you may be asked to leave and it is at the full discretion of the Roving Monitors.

8.         No drugs, alcohol, or intoxication.  It is inconsistent with our safety and learning agendas.

Please don’t put us in a position where we have to ask you to leave.

9.         Report any problems or issues to a Monitor immediately, or come to Susan or myself.  If something makes you uncomfortable, you are free to leave the demo or discuss it with our monitors.  Our monitors will help you process what you saw and make arrangements for you to do whatever you think best, but the responsibility to approach them is yours. 

10.       You can ask people anything, but listen respectfully, even if what they say makes you uncomfortable. 

In addition:

11. Station Monitors and the 3 Roving Monitors are AASECT volunteers.  They are akin to Dungeon Monitors.  They are here for your physical and emotional safety.  Their job is mainly just to watch, and to talk to you if something you are experiencing makes you overly uncomfortable.

12. People in this group and in the lifestyle are at various stages of ‘outness’ about their participation.  It is courteous to stick to whatever names people introduce themselves under, even if you think you know them by another one.

13. Freedom.  You are free to question and participate in the demos as time allows.  That means declining to participate, changing your mind, and using your safeword.  Try to suspend judgment of everyone, including yourself, if you have reactions you didn’t expect.  These may indicate opportunities for learning that we could give to you in no other way.

That is our contract, and unless you withdraw consent and leave the event, it will end when you leave this space.

Susan: Play and Aftercare

Attendees can choose to be bottoms to “taste” the sensation. We’ll give tastings to everyone that we can, but not everyone will get to taste everything. You don’t have to participate in the tasting of any of these sensations.

An important point of context…

I have seen people new to public dungeon space get triggered by different things.  We cannot anticipate what will trigger 125 people.  What we do know is that it helps people to remember that each scene has been enthusiastically consented to in this specific context and thoroughly negotiated by all parties involved.

The demonstrations themselves will take place simultaneously and will last for 5-10 minutes. Each will consist of:

1. Brief negotiation between the Demo Top and the demo bottom

2. Instructions on the technique being demonstrated, along with explanation of safety and the equipment being used

3. Short demonstration

4. Aftercare in which the Top and bottom connect and assess the scene

5. Then the demonstrator and bottom will take questions

6. Some “Tastings” by the attendees, which includes several basic negotiation questions along with brief Aftercare check-in

Approximately 30 minutes of tasting will take place, and then the demo teams will do another short demonstration. You can move between the demonstrations to observe and taste each sensation. Or you can observe from the seats around the edge of the room.

Now let me introduce the amazing educators from Thunder in the Mountains. Liz is the Marketing Director of Thunder and the organizer of the demo teams! Brian has been co-producing with Liz. They are available to answer any questions you have.

Our 8 stations are set up around the room where you can see demonstrations of: flogging, spanking, bondage, electrical play, wax play, bootblacking, puppy and pony play, and temporary piercing. Attendees will not be able to taste the temp piercing, but you will get to observe the demonstrations.

Our amazing Demo Teams and DMs are: (go through the final list clockwise around the room where the demo teams are waiting to get started!)

There will not be a Q & A session at the end so ask your questions to the appropriate people as you enjoy the evening. Look for those of us wearing an orange vest and ask your questions! On the NCSF table, we have flyers for a bar night happening at Trade later tonight if you’d like to enjoy a more play atmosphere.

If you would like help processing what happens at this event tomorrow, please drop by the NCSF table in the exhibit area or come to the AASECT Alt Sex SIG munch tomorrow evening at…

Now let’s get started!

7:30ish – Demos

AASECT Monitors will be each assigned a station to watch over, answer questions or get the attendee to the Roving Monitors, Susan, Nelly or Anna so they can answer their question.

Even if you have a long line of people waiting for a taste, stop every 30 minutes or so and go through your short demonstration from negotiation to play to aftercare again for the people who were at other stations and missed it the first time around.

10 pm – Demos end

10-11pm – Equipment loaded out

Sex in the Time of Corona: Tips for Groups

Most work on Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context is solely my work.  This document is the product of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s (NCSF) Educational Outreach Committee chaired by Susan Wright, and consisting of Tess Zachry of APEX, Matt Connolly, Western Region Polyamory Advocate and myself as Professionals Advocate.

The social distancing behaviors (we are using the media friendly term here even though the behaviors public health officals are recommending actually constitute physical distancing, not social isolation) recommended by public health authorities https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/social-distancing.html pose a severe challenge to those who crave the physical intimacy of sex, including many non-sexual behaviors in BDSM and kink settings.  Many BDSM, poly and swinging social clubs have stopped meeting and many events have been cancelled in compliance with state quarantine provisions and the best medical advice.  There are some indications that social discourse in many such groups is way down, and this raises the topic of what social clubs might do to help their members and the public cope with the disruptions imposed by social distancing and illness.  NCSF created this resource to provide support for clubs and assemble some suggestions about best practices culled from NCSF Coalition Partners, psychological theory, and the new rules of social and sexual engagement with strangers.  

First, the basics.  Protection from COVID-19 means having sex with fewer partners and only with those who you know are healthy and managing their risks well.  Because the COVID-19 virus has a 14-day incubation and hardly anyone has been tested, it is very difficult to know who is a carrier but not yet symptomatic.  While obviously ill people can be avoided by simply moving away from them, being intimate with a non-symptomatic carrier creates a high risk of transmission.   Yet neither you nor they will know who is ill. This makes it risky to meet and recommends that people stay 6 feet or more from one another, and it is no wonder that many clubs have cancelled all events and stopped meeting face-to-face as a result.

Psychological resilience theory identifies a number of components of resilient behavior.  To quote the American Psychological Association https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience. These are the coping strategies of resilience.  They include:

Prioritize Relationships – It is easy to see how kink and non-monogamy social groups do that, and when they stop meeting, it can interfere with members’ opportunity to do that. 

Join a Group – disbanding a group or putting it on hiatus can definitely be an obstacle to joining.

Take Care of Your Body – Sex is a part of that care.  While some sexual needs can be met effectively solo, some cannot.

Practice Mindfulness – While social clubs are not one meditation opportunity after another, people can have aggravated mindfulness needs in anxiety provoking circumstances like a national pandemic.  Likewise, being with trusted friends can be calming even if no meditation breaks out!

Avoid Negative Outlets – Not everyone uses social clubs in a positive manner, but clubs often provide protective space and educational content that do help people meet kinky and adventurous needs more safely.

Help Others – While social clubs are hardly the only venue for this, they are often relatively safe places for people to disclose their sexuality and get help that is riskier to try to get other places.  

Be Proactive – The social distancing and economic consequences of this pandemic are a big threat to many people’s established patterns of proactivity.  Conversely, helping your group survive the pandemic can be a very constructive outlet.

Move Toward Your Goals – This takes a great deal of flexibility in uncertain and scary times like these.  For people whose goals were framed in the context of a group’s activities, changes in how it works can be an obstacle

Look for Opportunities for Self-Discovery – Often social groups play a key role in supporting their members self-discovery.  Conversely, dramatic changes can teach members things about themselves that the status quo tends to conceal, if they can stay open to new learning.

Keep Things in Perspective – we do a lot of this in the context of relationships, so disruption in those relationships can threaten our ability to use them this way.

Accept Change – it is much harder to accept dramatic, unforeseen and imposed changes than it is to embrace planned, gradual and autonomously selected changes.  A pandemic like COVID-19 is far more of the former type than the latter.

Maintain a Hopeful Outlook – This is easiest when the future is clear and predictable, and when one is not experiencing other losses.  Needless to say, job loss, illness and death are not conducive to a hopeful outlook.

Learn from Your Past – It is generally beyond the scope of most social groups’ missions to be responsible for people’s past histories.  But it is possible to be more supportive of people if you recognize the group’s importance in their histories and act to support those functions that you can sustain even in trying times like these.

This ends the APA’s list.  It is obvious from that list that the COVID-19 threatens many people’s sources of resilience.  In addition to decreases in social contact, a collapse in economic activity, and ill-health caused by the pandemic, people can be expected to have coping troubles, and that certainly includes kink, CNM and swinging club members.  Here are few other things to keep in mind about resilience:

Diversity of Experience — It is important to realize that, although your group may have many roles in your member’s lives and that it will not be the same for all members nor will it possible to solve all challenges, recognizing some of these things can help you prioritize how to respond.  

Resilience can be limited — It is also important to respond within your group’s resources.  Many groups have a social support fund for members who face sudden medical and economic crises.  It is important not to overspend these so that you can accommodate emergencies that arise in the future.  Likewise, it is important not to overspend your time energy and emotion in times when you are feeling needy or limited.  And this will be true of your leadership and rank and file members, too.

Seek Help – It is important to know what other groups are doing and what kink friendly and knowledgeable resources are available in your communitiesIt can be very helpful to know the kink and poly-aware practitioners in your community, have suicide prevention and other helpline numbers handy.  We have not provided these here because most of them are local and specific to your group.  https://www.kapprofessionals.org/

Use negotiation– It turns out, RACK is a good guideline for lots of matters beyond kink scenes.  In RACK, partners disclose their concerns, desires, risk factors and limits and agree to operate within a contract that complies with these requirements.  Consent, negotiation, action, and evaluation work well in decisions about what to do even when there is no social emergency and no play, not just is kink action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-aware_consensual_kink

Keep it Simple – Because the pandemic is highly stressful and uncertain, expect to have to execute the changes you are having to make now under even more adverse conditions later.  Design for sustainability. It is easier to start simple and add more later than to have to scale back your plans, especially when your potential members are already facing lots of loss and disruption already.

We know specific things about the kink population that it is useful to keep in mind when you are deciding how you wish to change your group:

NCSF’s own consent surveys have shown 70% of out kink social group members are not out to someone important in their daily lives.  Who they are not out to varies a lot, but this means that your group may be a crucial part of some members’ support systems, and sensitivity to how people are limited in how they are out is important to people in changing the group meetings.  For example, this will influence how you can and cannot change your electronic contacts policy, when people can come to events, and how they wish to be contacted. Be respectful of people’s diverse needs for privacy and even secrecy.

Although kink folk have not been found to be less mentally healthy than conventional people, they do suffer from mental health problems like everyone else, and some more so due to stigma around variant sexuality.  Due to stigma, kinksters have higher levels of past suicide attempts and serious plans than do the non-kinky comparison groups. Heterosexuals have the lowest risk followed by gays/lesbians, and transgendered/gender fluid folk have the highest past suicide risk. This was discovered by the Kink Health Study by Waldura, Arora, Randall, Farala and Sprott in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (2016) 13(12) pp. 1918-1929. It is highly likely that further intersectionalities including race, ethnicities and disability stack further. So social support is likely to be even more critical for these folks in stressful times. Supportive contact need not be sexual in order for people to retain a sense of acceptance and community if you can find a way by to keep folks in touch with one another.

Kinky and non-monogamous people like what they like and privilege their subjective sense of pleasure.  This means that forced changes like social distancing are not going to appeal to everyone, and that not everyone who likes the current group arrangements is going to stay with you through these changes.  Although you will return to meeting face-to-face after social distancing subsides, not everyone is going to manage those transitions.

Everyoneis going to be grieving the social and economic changes imposed by this pandemic, regardless of whether they get sick or lose someone important to them.  This will act as sand in the cogs of much social machinery, and create the need for grief work in your group even though your original purpose was arranging sexy fun and hot social contacts.

All of these considerations frame finding ways to support your members in ways other than meeting for play. While some people will not want to meet if no sex is involved, group members have many needs that can be met.  Furthermore, group members are used to getting social, educational and social needs met in the group above and beyond the sex. That creates opportunities for your social groups to discover these and try to meet them in other ways that are consistent with good public health.

If you found any of the above information a sound basis to go forward, how do you go about deciding what to do next?

  1.  Do an assessment of your current situation.  Answer questions about what resources your group members need, what resources are they likely to be able to bring to the club now that meeting purposes have changed, what else is being done in the community to support people, and who will be able to execute the planned changes you want to implement to support them.  This might involve making a few phone calls, starting an on-line thread, or holding video conferencing planning meetings depending on your resources and community norms.
  1. Reevaluate your electronic communication and privacy policies.  This has a privacy dimension, a logistical dimension, and a technical dimension.  Your group may not ordinarily allow video, so arranging group Skype, Zoom, Discord or Google hangouts meetings requires getting group members’ consent to use such venues with the security risks they entail.  Then presenters need to master the logistics of being able to mount such meetings, and finally, the membership needs support getting up to speed with the technology that will permit participation. Not everyone has the resources or the access to electronics to allow them to participate.
  2. Find the people who want to do the hard work setting this up and will follow through with it, and make sure they have the resources to support the effort.
  1. Make sure those resources are within the club’s limits and can be maintained if they succeed and members come to rely on them.  It is crucial to maintain momentum.

Here are some examples of what some of NCSF’s Coalition Partner groups are doing:

1.  Move meetings to an online platform. I have been able to host support and educational meetings, virtual happy hours and an erotic reading online. I’m also stressing that while online meetings may in the future become part of the group’s overall program, it will not replace F2F meetings in the new normal. 

2. Understand that your online attendance will be different then your in-person attendance. People who don’t make it F2F events will suddenly appear and others who enjoy the F2F will disappear. Attendance will most likely be lower but the people who attend will enjoy and appreciate it. Strive for quality vs. quantity and the long term. Allow for a learning curve in the beginning and understand that as people are figuring out how to hunker down, attending an online meeting may slide in priority. Your role is to create a space that will be available when they are ready. 

3. Be ready to discover that the same people who are always willing host an event in person may not want to do the same via an online format or may not have the ready technology to make this happen. For example, hosting online karaoke is possible (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YtR901sBeuCH9anVsQgL1bYsvP5Bdj8yDTZKOPKxRvU/edit) but requires a bit of an extra effort and mindset that this person may not feel comfortable creating.

4. Know that a one-hour online meeting will be equal to a two-hour in person event.

5. If possible, use an external webcam and/or mic with a tripod. It allows you to do things like create wide shots of virtual bars or static shots of fire pits. 

6. When hosting an educational meeting online, allow for a check in of needs and emotional support but don’t let a discussion of the pandemic take precedence. Avoid making informal social meetings a forum *solely* for dark pandemic discussion as well. Come prepared with questions like “What is the funniest thing that has happened to you since you have been working from home?” or share funny songs. 

7. Look for ways to make connections with other Groups. There is no reason why I can’t host a virtual Happy Hour in Phoenix and invite people from Florida. This is a great opportunity to expand your world view. 

8. Use your group’s other social media platforms to share informational and humorous articles and videos. Post regularly. Example include:

https://www.multiamory.com/events/open-hangout-march-31st

How to Have Sex During the Coronavirus Quarantine

How to have sex when you're quarantined…Sign up for the Livestream Comedy Here – https://store.awakenwithjp.com/friday-night-still-alive

Posted by JP Sears on Tuesday, March 24, 2020

https://psiloveyou.xyz/the-6th-love-language-89e699d6e66e

9. Be aware that a certain percentage of your group will still be uncomfortable with online meetings and will 100% prefer to meet in person. Keeping in mind any local health directives, and working within physical distancing guidelines, you may decide it is acceptable to have small group discussions. If you are fortunate to have an outdoor location, it is suggested you hold such a meeting there. Have people bring their own food and beverage and make available sanitizer supplies. Grieve the loss of intimacy and connection that social distancing entails.  Lots of funny memes are circulating about deciding how to preserve some of the clubs usefulness to members and the community even after, however Love in the Time of Corona is the party introverts have been waiting all their lives.  But these enforced changes are scary, stressful, and involve sacrifice, even for introverts. Having the kids home all day means no private time for your sexual relief. Partners are unavailable who you could count on before. The electronics you like to use for sex need may now need to be shared.  And all those stirred up emotions can have a deadening effect on your, or your partner’s sex, social, or kink drive. Acknowledging feelings of loss is important in managing them.

Not all sex activity needs to be given up:

Examples include group masturbation in which everyone stays six feet apart and doesn’t exchange fluids.  Fetish play scenarios involving total encasement. Phone sex, erotica exchange, readings, porn use, and teledildonics are all examples, and you group can run educational sessions and events around the many kinds of kinky activity that are possible within social distancing guidelines.

Being psychologically flexible is an advantage, but takes a lot of energy.  If your risk tolerance means you must change your way of being pleasured, this takes real emotional labor.  Give yourself and your group members as much time and leeway as you can to make difficult changes. Be tolerant with yourself and your group when you or they can’t do everything you ask of each other right away.

Clean yourself, your toys, your clothing, your electronics and your space much as you would wash your hands.  If you have studied how long the virus can survive on various materials, wait to use them again until after a period in which the virus would naturally have expired.

Tolerance of delayed gratification, ambiguity, your anxiety and the anxiety of others are all important lubricants that smooth the dramatic changes social distancing requires.  Others are going to handle this differently than you do that you cannot anticipate or control. Be sure to manage your distance from these things if they become to frustrating.

Give yourself and your group permission to try to preserve as much pleasure, touch, sensuality and fun as you can.  That is what this post is all about, and one of the rich sources of meaning that makes necessary sacrifices bearable.  

Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context has a longer post on kink resilience here.  https://elephantinthehottub.com/2019/01/resilience  

Sex is an important part of life.  Despite the fact that sex can be over-regulated and heavily socially stigmatized, many of the principles that make your general life more effective and satisfying apply to sex. 

Finally, nothing we have said on here is anywhere near the last word in hope to manage your group during social distancing.  Please leave strategies and programs your group has tried that you think will help others respond to this threat to our communities.  We are all stronger together! Please leave these insights and examples in the comment section, below.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, NCSF, Tess Zachary, Susan Wright and Matt Connolly Ann Arbor MI, April 2020.

Sex in the Time of Corona

A latex cosplay medical mask. Timely, fashionable, but not effective COVID-19 protection.

The social distancing behaviors recommended by public health authorities pose a severe challenge to those who crave the physical intimacy of sex.  We know from the HIV/AIDS epidemic that people were slow to adapt to the dangers of HIV transmission even when the vectors of transmission were well understood.  Over thirty-five years into our grapple with the HIV, a few people are virus chasing and bareback riding.  If you need such risks to get satisfaction, no amount of evidence-based advice will be of much help.  But if you are concerned about your health, there are things you can do to manage your risk.

  1.  Have sex with fewer partners and only with those who you know are managing their risks well.  Because the COVID-19 virus has a 14-day incubation and hardly anyone has been tested, it is very difficult to know who is a carrier but not yet symptomatic.  While obviously ill people can be avoided by simply moving away from them, being intimate with a non-symptomatic carrier creates a high risk of transmission.  Mostly, that is a matter of trust, not certainty. For certainty, you can only have the kind of sex in which you stay 6 feet away from your partner(s) if you cannot know they are infection free.
  2. Practice R.A.C.K. — Risk Aware Consensual Kink. This term from BDSM is a method used by people who commonly deal with sexual risks to manage those risks as ethically as possible. RACK entails disclosing your concerns and desires to partners, discussing your risks with each other, and contracting to act strictly within your partner(s) and your own desires and limits. You do not need to be kinky to do this, and it is a great idea because all sexual activity carries some risks.  The only new element here is the COVID-19’s risk characteristics. Sex has always required trust. Even with a thorough examination of the risks and benefits of any activity, be aware that you may feel very differently if it goes wrong than you anticipated during contracting.  Drive slowly, in the fog, your headlights only extend so far.
  3. Often, you will make a more rational decision if you take the advice of others rather than just relying your imagination and making your best guess.  Reading articles like this really can help make more rational decisions if you follow the advice given.  But no advice is perfect, and in an ambiguous situation like this one, there are no guarantees. The people who write well meaning advice like this do not get the direct consequences of your decisions, even if psychological research says taking advice is more rational.
  4. Use barriers.  Jokes about having sex in skin-tight latex bodysuits and hazmat gear are meant to be funny, but they are correct that barriers are essential when dealing with infected people.  And many potential partners have limited control over their exposure due to work or living circumstances.  The biggest risks are through body orifices, especially eyes, nose and mouth.  It is not yet known how many cases have been sexually transmitted. Expect other openings and wounds to be vulnerabilities. COVID-19 is known to be transmitted through contact with fecal matter.
  5. The smaller the social groups in which you solicit, the better.  Sex with your long term monogamous partner really is safer than using Tindr, and within your polycule is safer than with most new partners.  The more partners you have, the less statistics are on your side.  And risk is determined by actual behavior, not by verbal claim or psychological identification.  If you or your partner cheat, or fail to use protection, the risks are real.
  6. Grieve the loss of intimacy and connection that social distancing entails.  Lots of funny memes are circulating that Love in the Time of Corona is the party introverts have been waiting for all their lives.  But these enforced changes are scary, stressful, and involve sacrifice, even for introverts.  Having the kids home all day means no private time for your sexual relief.  Partners are unavailable who you could count on before.  The electronics you like to use for sex need may now need to be shared.  And all those stirred up emotions can have a deadening effect on your, or your partner’s sex drive.  Acknowledging feelings of loss is important in managing them.
  7. Being psychologically flexible is an advantage, but takes a lot of energy.  If your risk tolerance means you must change your way of being pleasured, this takes real emotional labor.  Give yourself as much time and leeway as you can to make difficult changes.  Be tolerant with yourself and your loved ones when you or they can’t do everything you ask right away.
  8. Be creative with getting pleasure at a distance. Porn, teledildonics, phone sex and reading erotica are all ways of preserving some of your pleasure when your favorite activities are too unsafe to use right now. 
  9. Clean yourself, your toys, your clothing, your electronics and your bedding much as you would wash your hands.  If you have studied how long the virus can survive on various materials, wait to use them again until after a period in which the virus would naturally have expired.
  10. Tolerance of delayed gratification, ambiguity, your anxiety and the anxiety of others are all important lubricants that smooth the dramatic changes social distancing requires.  Others are going to handle this differently than you do and in ways that you cannot anticipate or control.  Be sure to manage your psychological distance from these things if they become to frustrating.
  11. Give yourself permission to try to preserve as much pleasure, touch, sensuality and fun as you can.  That is what this post is all about, and one of the rich sources of meaning that makes necessary sacrifices bearable. 

Many of these sexual coping strategies have a huge amount in common with psychological resilience.  The American Psychological Association has good resources on resilience here. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience   Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context has a longer post on resilience here.  https://elephantinthehottub.com/2019/01 Sex is an important part of life.  Despite the fact that sex can be over-regulated and heavily socially stigmatized, many of the principles that make your general life more effective and satisfying apply to sexuality, too.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD Ann Arbor MI, March 2020

Touch, Part II

If a ban on CE for touch is not needed for CE reciprocity with APA, why is it important to have?  Here is my understanding of the reasons AASECT has given for this policy:

  1. Touch is overstimulating. Traumatized and neuro-atypical trainees might be overstimulated by emotionally intense content.
  2. AASECT has a problem with sexual solicitation and harassment in its programs, and a strong barrier against touch in educational programs is needed to protect against such abuse.
  3. AASECT is assuming additional organizational risk to defend touch programing which could lead to pushback from powerful social conservatives and might threaten AASECT’s other work.  Educational touch is too dangerous to defend with AASECT’s limited resources.
  4. BDSM and other touching activities are more dangerous than other sexual activity and need special treatment by AASECT to teach with adequate safety to their trainees.
  5. AASECT is entitled to set its own boundaries, just like any individual is, so it has every right to declare educational touch to be outside its boundaries.
  6. AASECT has an obligation to protect the public, and that same obligation applies equally to trainees.  Therefore, if AASECT thinks clients should be protected from touch by our professionals, trainees must be protected in the same way.
  7. There are power differences among various members of the AASECT community.  Programs where trainees have the option to consent to educational touch constitute coercion to participate because of what powerful members of the AASECT community might think, and this kind of opportunity might affect later professional evaluations of trainees.
  8. Other organizations exclude educational touch from their training policies (perhaps not APA as noted in the previous post) so AASECT is behaving normatively and prudently to decide similarly using their examples.
  9. Implicitly, AASECT has argued that declining their proposed boundary rules constitutes unfair coercive treatment.  AASECT’s changing its boundary rules should not be cause for adverse consequences.
  10. AASECT also says that touch goes against their Ethical Code of Conduct because it forbids touch with “consumers.”

I will tackle these in turn:

“The Scream” by Edvard Munch, 1893 It is not always possible to foresee and avoid being overwhelmed by intense feelings. Informed consent and psychological support are very appropriate when learning about material that might be troubling.

1. AASECT, myself, or other outsiders do not get to decide what is triggering or overstimulating for others, including trainees.  It is entirely possible that an AASECT trainee might be triggered by intense material.  Because the ‘decision’ about what material is triggering is highly personal and subjective, any AASECT trainer might incorrectly estimate what is triggering.  In fact, traumatized people may have imperfect ability to anticipate what will trigger them, even with content warnings. There is legitimate scientific question and mixed research evidence that such warnings significantly protect readers.  However, AASECT does not shrink from presenting didactic material that might be triggering, and furthermore deliberately requires SAR material that might be triggering because AASECT has determined that the educational objectives of such programs justify the risks given the cautions and safety features of the program in question.  It is therefore marginalizing to ban consensual educational touch programs categorically as it implies no adequate safety could be programmed, nor that educational objectives could ever justify the risk.  AASECT’s own history of educational programs has repeatedly demonstrated such assumptions are not justified.  Past complaints of triggering by AASECT trainees does not justify banning any programs categorically, there have been too few such incidents to constitute reliable and representative data.  It is fair and reasonable to accurately describe content to be presented and allow trainees to decide whether they wish to undertake the risks and benefits of enrolling in it.

Susanna and the Elders by Guido Reni (1575-1642)

2. AASECT may have a problem with sexual harassment, although I am unclear that our problem exceeds that of similar organizations.  Many of them have genuine problems with this too. AASECT should act to further discourage sexual harassment.  What is clear that AASECT already has a good policy against sexual harassment and support for respectful communication, yet the incidence of such behaviors remains too high.  But AASECT completely lacks scientific evidence that programs containing consensual educational touch constitute any sort of additional risk of harassment than other AASECT programing including dances, fundraisers, munches and other activities that AASECT has not categorically banned, even though they carry no CEs.   AASECT’s Code of Ethical Conduct would suggest that regulation of professional conduct be based on sound clinical or scientific evidence.  No such evidence has been provided for this CE policy. Likewise, changes in sexual harassment policy need to take into account differences among diverse populations about how solicitation behavior is understood, and be evidence-based as to its effectiveness. The presence of some sexual harassment in the AASECT community does not constitute sufficient evidence for banning CE programs categorically.  This is evidence of prejudice against touch and kink, not of their association with harassment.

J W Marriott Hotels have sex negative policies and AASECT often holds meetings there. AASECT sometimes has contractual obligations that interfere with quality programing. Probably not at this one, which is in Dubai!

3. It is true that it is riskier for AASECT to support experiential programing, and to support consensual educational touch, than to avoid them.  I argued earlier that AASECT cannot afford to cede responsibility for some of these risks and continue to claim leadership in the field of sexuality training.  Indeed, AASECT has an important training role because other organizations  declined to undertake the risks of human sexuality training.  Yes, touch is riskier, but it is necessary risk given AASECTs Mission, Vision of Sexual Health, and AASECT’s role in the training community.  While I am inclined to discount the risks of social conservatives per se, AASECT does deal with large hospitality corporations.  Some, like Marriott, have policies against single women at the bar in the hotel restaurants and discouraging sex talk in the hallways where minors and families might hear.  The law is very clear that Marriott has that right.  This might require some training be conducted off-site to protect AASECT, but doesn’t justify a change in CE policy for AASECT’s strict adherence to business contracts.  AASECT has less stigmatizing options it has failed to take.

4. Despite the prima facie evidence that some BDSM activities are dangerous, I hasten to point out that many sexual activities that AASECT undertakes to teach about are less safe than most kinky activities and that did not dissuade it from teaching about STI transmission, dating apps, sexual assault, child sexual abuse and exploitation, problem sexual behavior, and trauma, all of which are fraught content.  It is stigmatizing to single out the risks of kink behaviors or touch as special cases of such risks given the severity of content AASECT routinely assumes the responsibility to teach.  Indeed, AASECT has the responsibility of dealing sensitively with all content, touch or not.  That requires sensitivity to context.  This policy is an egregious example of marginalizing sexual diversity AASECT should shrink from modeling.  It is setting a terrible example for education about touch, too, and marginalizes others who use touch completely unnecessarily and unprofessionally.  Much of this content does not lend itself to being taught experientially or with educational touch.  But where experiential training and/or touch can be effective, they should get full credit.

Witch burning: setting boundaries or oppression? When you undertake regulation, you are setting boundaries for everyone.

5. In claiming the right to set its own boundaries, AASECT is failing to acknowledge its powerful role as a regulator.  AASECT is depriving its trainees and its professional members the right to consent to programs that involved sexual touch by refusing to grant full credit for them.  That is boundary setting for everybody else, not just for AASECT.  This boundary analogy breaks down because of the inherent power imbalance between AASECT and its members.  I do not get to unilaterally set my boundaries so as to limit your professional freedoms.  The best analogy here is to the behavior of American fundamentalist religious organizations who are claiming that it violates their religious freedom to limit their ability to regulate the behavior of nonbelievers, a position AASECT rightly opposes as repressive.  Ultimately, AASECT does get to set its own boundaries. Prior to this policy it  was completely able to deny CE to any program, touch-based or not, that fails to protect it trainees or discredited the field in any manner and it had that power before this policy change without marginalizing anyone gratuitously.

6. It is my contention that AASECT’s primary responsibility is to protect the public first, and trainees second.  This is where their boundaries belong.  This does not license the abuse of trainees, but neither does it prevent training experiences that may be effortful and even painful to some.  If AASECT declines to certify experiential training that includes touch, it is reasonable to think AASECT will be unable to tell if trainees are emotionally and intellectual competent to handle such material.  That would abrogate its responsibilities to assess that trainees have adequate self-knowledge and emotional control to safely provide services to the publics the trainees intend to serve under the aegis of legitimacy conferred by their AASECT certifications.  While it would be better if no trainees were ever stressed or triggered by such instruction, it is far better that AASECT discovered their vulnerabilities now when it could support addressing such vulnerabilities than have them emerge in educational or therapeutic services later with clients.  Anyone evaluating whether AASECT certification provides any assurance that people are qualified to work with kinky clients should be alarmed to hear that it has entirely banned programs that might better assure that trainees or certified professionals can handle the emotional stressors of working with this population. This educational policy assures that AASECT is failing to guarantee that trainees are taught the skills to manage their personal feelings about content in the areas in which the trainees intend to practice.  All of this is emphatically true given that no AASECT touch based CE has ever been required for certification, and most such approved programs have had safeties, security arrangements to keep out the public, and even signed waivers as evidence of consent to participate.  Because touch is fraught content, mostly presenters who used it have been very careful with it.

7. It is a general flaw in our efforts to support consent education that we too often assume that there is relative social equality in negotiations for social contracting.  In fact, considerable discrepancies in social power are the norm, and contracting between relative equals is simpler, but far from common.  There are differences in status, education, power, attractiveness, historical service to the organization, as well as race, ethnicity, sex preference and gender identity in the AASECT community.  AASECT handles some of the differences better than others, but inequality exists and cannot be fully mitigated.  In consequence, the criticism that consent to AASECT’s rules, including the Code of Ethical conduct and AASECT’s Certification guidelines and educational policies and credit bearing programs is fraught.  It is partly out of recognition of these differences that I left AASECT.  I could afford to do this to oppose AASECT educational touch policy.  Others cannot professionally abandon their certifications, even if AASECT has acted to decrease their value.  Apprehensiveness about what supervisors and presenters may think is real.  It figured very prominently in my graduate training.  We were always discussing what clinical supervisors might think of our work.  Some of my colleagues were marginalized and their careers harmed by supervisors’ poor opinions of their work.  That is an inevitable consequence of the power which we cede to others when we submit to education.  But banning educational touch to reduce this does not make sense unless you imagine that consensual educational touch constitutes a special vulnerability that doesn’t apply to written work, presentation ratings, and every other conduct that might be evaluated in AASECT’s professional space.  We do not ban social activity because a supervisor might think badly of a supervisee in such a setting, or ban fundraisers where a powerful person might make a judgment about a less powerful person’s generosity. Eventually, this boils down to AASECT not being willing to stand behind the professional conduct of supervisors.  It is natural for trainees to have these fears.  It is one of the obligations of having the power to supervise not to abuse that power.  A ban on educational touch is a crabwalk away from standing up for professionalism.  I frankly have not seen failure to supervise professionally about touch content in any AASECT educational content.  There has been a program where unapproved touch was demonstrated by a guest presenter from outside the professional community.  I will discuss that in the next part of this series.  There have been too few programs for such a pattern to emerge, nor to make an evidence-based case that they are dangerous.

8. It has been argued that some organizations, e.g. The Woodhull Freedom Foundation, have bans on educational touch in their events so AASECT should do the same.  That is nice for Woodhull, is certainly their prerogative, but except APA, which I have already much belabored, most other sexuality organizations do not have the responsibility of certifying fitness for professional practice in sexuality education, counseling or sex therapy.  The risk/rewards and advocacy purposes of such an organization like Woodhull are fundamentally different for those of AASECT.  I fail to see why anyone would find Woodhull’s behavior relevant.  Removing a total ban on CE for programs that involve touch in no way requires AASECT or its CE providers to offer them, although the field would be ill-served if no one offered any.  Someone will design quality programs if AASECT doesn’t prohibit CE for them.

The Peaceable Kingdom by American Artist Edward Hicks circa 1830-32

9. AASECT is not entitled to freedom from pushback of their policies, even from non-members, under any reasonable boundary rules about consent.   In BDSM social organizations, Safe Sane and Consensual never meant that anyone had to agree to play with everyone else.  But neither did it imply that there were no consequences to declining to consent.  If I decline to consent to AASECT’s educational policies, I have to leave AASECT.  If you violate your contract with me, as AASECT has, I might be offended or speak ill of your professionalism, which I have.  And if you marginalize a community by your behavior, it may choose to take social action against you.  Consent does not mean that that everyone lies down together in a peaceable kingdom, the lion lying benignly with the lamb.  Consent means orderly agreement when there is agreement about boundaries.  Sometimes it means war where boundaries cannot be negotiated.  To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is not just policy by other means, but peaceful agreements about boundaries are policy, too.  They reflect shared common interests.  Where consent cannot be secured, nonconsensual conflict resolution continues.  In creating social justice and mutual alliance, that matters to community, too.

Do good fences make good neighbors? The Berlin Wall shortly before its fall was a symptom of conflict between the Soviet Bloc and the West.

10. While it is crucially important that the consumers of services from AASECT’s certified professionals can trust that they will be treated ethically and professionally, it is not true that this requirement prevents AASECT trainees from ever consenting to AASECT approved educational credits that might involve consensual touch.  There is nothing inherently unprofessional or unethical about approving CE’s of professionally conducted instruction that is apt to the content being conveyed and offers adequate protection against mishaps or problems.  Touch is not that risky, and some content is best conveyed in that manner, and if a trainee does have problems with material they have consented to participate in, the resolution of those problems is an opportunity to protect the trainee and the consumer from later problems that it is AASECT’s mission to address.  To treat trainees as if they were the same as general consumers makes the mistake of equating trainees’ power and responsibilities with those of people seeking mental health services.  If trainees seek to become providers, they must shoulder the responsibilities of protecting consumers even if that sacrifice is stressful.  This is the decision AASECT made about SARs, and it is appropriate to extend it to other well designed content that involves consensual touch.  I know of no AASECT program where touch was offered where trainees couldn’t elect to opt out, and no AASECT content except SARs that is compulsory. No one is suggesting that touch be compulsory, or kink training be compulsory in an organization in which only a large minority of trainees are interested in working with this population

Other arguments have been made in favor of the marginalizing aspects of this educational touch policy that deserve even less serious rebuttal.  Some have claimed superior knowledge about kink because they are community insiders.  This is identity politics and based upon very weak critical thinking.   The kink/consensual non-monogamy/swinging communities which NCSF represents are very diverse.  It took NCSF about 5 years to hammer out agreeable wording on what constitutes consent, and this by no means levelled all the differences in how it is implemented across our various Coalition Partners.  Other organizations in kink declined to join, complaining that outside moralists were trying to control them.  NCSF represents over 100 different kinky and non-monogamous organizations, some very large and of longstanding such as The Eulenspiegel Society and  Kink.com, and others, like a single kink-aware psychology practice which just joined last week.  Research by Debby Herbenick suggests that while NCSF represents only a fraction of all kink organizations, all ‘out’ kinky social clubs and events have only touched about 10% of the Americans who do kinky behaviors once a month of more often.  We at NCSF are more representative than any one person’s opinion, but we do not encompass everyone.  What NCSF has found is that people who try to assert that their version of kink is better than everyone else’s are often self-interested and those least deserving of consideration.  Worst among these are the predators whose claim to expertise about kink is really a power play intended to seduce the inexperienced.  Any claim to credibility my personal views have in this matter has to do with correctly predicting what Ruby Bouie Johnson and the Philadelphia demonstrators, the NCSF Board, and APA were going to do, not my personal standing or experience in kink being better than someone else’s.  Indeed, Herbenick et al have the first data set capable of speaking to what the 90% of non-joiners are like.  I mention this because most clients who come to AASECT professionals for education or training are likely to do so because they have avoided, rather than joined kinky communities.  In fact, given our fraught professional histories kink social organizations compete to some extent with AASECT educators and with the health professions in educating their members and helping them resolve conflicts.  There are good reasons to suspect that kink insiders do not understand these people particularly well.

This brings up another danger from the AASECT touch policy that I am eager to prevent in forcing its repeal.  In the last two years, guidelines have been established for treating the kinky population have been generated mostly outside of the AASECT community.  “Guidelines for the Treatment of Consensual Non-Monogamy” has been developed by the aforementioned American Psychological Association Division 44: Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity Task Force on Consensual Non-Monogamy.  Leadership in developing the Kink Treatment Guidelines does not reside primarily in AASECT either having been taken up by the leadership in the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS) chaired by Richard Sprott, PhD and the Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute (DSREI) chaired by Charles Moser, MD.  Although AASECT members are part of both of these bodies, and both of the clinical guidelines efforts, AASECT as an organization missed the opportunity to lead these efforts that are central to its mission.

Those missed opportunities, like the retrograde educational touch policy and discussions about weakening AASECT Certification standards, actually reflect growing fragmentation of the field in the age of Trump.  His election is an example of a world-wide trend towards greater nationalism, less tolerance of diversity, and tribalism.  In these conditions, people identify with micro-communities and are less willing to conform to the demands of larger polities.  This is a problem for psychotherapy, which needs to be provided by practitioners that understand whomever walks through the consulting room door. I have often heard it said that it takes a kinky person to provide good kinky therapy, and that the first step to dealing with social stigma is out oneself and to join a local kink community.  That is good advice for some clients, but by no means a sound general practice applicable to all clients.   Needless to say, we would not say this about problem porn use, erectile dysfunction, and persistent genital arousal disorder!  In those conditions, support groups are often helpful, but we do not encourage people to identify their diagnosis as an identity, and we do not assume that good education, which kink social groups often do provide, is all the treatment that is needed.  Providing permission and information are the first steps in Jack Anon’s PLISSIT Model, not the equivalent of all the intervention that is ever needed.  So any fragmentation of the communities that requires shared identity politics as a precondition for the best treatment is a barrier to fighting stigma and to the best client centered treatment.

Lastly, the argument has been raised that the AASECT touch policy change is about the educational program Taste of Kink.  AASECT, NCSF, and I have all tried to dispel this idea, but because Taste of Kink was scheduled to occur in Philadelphia and had been run successfully in Minnesota and in Denver, the fate of the program has become emblematic of the policy change.   I will discuss the history, program objectives, approval and implementation of Taste of Kink in my next post.  For the record, Taste of Kink was cancelled by AASECT in Philadelphia when NCSF, backed by its designers, notified AASECT that the policy change revoking a full three CE’s for the three-hour program. That was a violation of the contract NCSF had with AASECT that rendered it impossible to recruit the demonstration teams.  That dispute provides an instructive case study in boundary negotiation and consent, and intersectionality, but is not crucial to understanding the larger issues of AASECT’s policy role in sexuality education and sex therapy training, thus it merits a separate post.

AASECT is strongly encouraged to rewrite its policies regarding consensual educational touch so that all educational modalities are genuinely protective of AASECT trainees, but the legitimacy of all valuable instructional modalities, including touch specifically, are not marginalized.  It is AASECT’s courage, leadership, embrace of diversity and expertise that legitimize its position of leadership in training for practice in the professional fields of sexuality, not its rejection of touch.  That is weak, scared and divisive, and fails to protect the public, especially the erotically marginalized part of the public who are in most is need of AASECT’s protection.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD Ann Arbor MI, March 2020

Touch, Part I: A Brief History of AASECT Regarding Consensual Educational Touch

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel features the power of touch in creation.

“…so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.”

Hamlet, Act I, scene 2 — William Shakespeare

“Oh, my love, my darling

I’ve hungered for your touch…” 

Unchained Melody — Hy Zaret and Alex North

The Power of Touch:  A casual perusal of Western mythology suggests that it is scarcely possible to overestimate the power of touch.  Sleeping Beauty is entirely overcome by a mere pin prick and awakened by a single kiss.  A frog is transformed back into a prince by, again, a single kiss.  Smeagol is embarked upon the loathsome transformation into Gollum by unknowingly grasping the One Ring of Power.  Sophie is doomed by the wrenching loss of her son to the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust as he is torn violently from her grasp.  There is no shortage of tales about the transformative power of touch, for good or for ill in our culture. 

A cat and person taking pleasure in touch.

The power of touch domesticated horses, dogs and cats.  It undergirds the power of healing to so great a degree that many religions including Christianity have powerful stories of healing by touch alone.   These are not restricted to the revival tent, Freud and Breuer, having initially discovered resistance, experimented with overcoming it by laying hands on their hysterical patients, pressing their foreheads in a naive attempt to overcome it.  Amidst our recognition of its power, Masters and Johnson formulated behavioral therapy for sexual problems that emphasized the power of pleasurable touch to change behavior.  We are regularly learning of the role of neurotransmitters and hormones that are triggered by touch, and our professional and criminal regulations struggle to delineate the boundaries between professional and therapeutic touch and abusive behavior.  National scandals around it are a daily occurrence in the news media, from the American women’s gymnastics scandal to the chronic crises of sexual exploitation that enmire the Roman Catholic Church internationally, to stories of politicians at the highest level who sexually exploit interns in the Oval Office or brag on national TV that their power can coerce acquiescence, if not consent, from beauty pageant contestants by touch alone.

Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson’s pioneering work in sex therapy relied on touch and physiological measurement of sexual response. It would have been impossible without touch. They advocated sexual surrogacy, and tried to legitimate it with only partial success.

The Need for Legitimacy:  Our friends at AASECT then, can be forgiven for a certain apprehension about the power of educational touch in their educational programs.  Striving to define their sexual health practitioners amidst the power and danger of touch and desire is a daunting task.  Striving for legitimacy, sex educators, counselors and therapists know that legitimacy is hard to sustain in stigmatized sexual discourse.  In an age where public perceptions of a thing often trump established scientific facts, legitimacy is evanescent and always under challenge.  One need only examine the titles of AASECT Annual Conferences to see how difficult this is.  Although sexuality is strongly associated with pleasure, AASECT commonly goes for 7-8 years at a time before frustrated activists put ‘pleasure’ in the title.   For an enlightening comparison, look at how long it has been since their conference title included the word ‘touch.’  For the curious, AASECT has used “pleasure” twice and “sensuality” once in the 25 years over which I have records.  It has used touch zero times.

Medieval guildhalls in the Grote Markt in Antwerp, Belgium. As trade became increasingly important in the Middle Ages, guilds of craftsmen became powerful. They controlled who could become a journeyman and acted politically to protect their professions. Today, professional associations perform many of the same functions.

Guilding Politics and Protection of the Public:  Partly this is a consequence of the guilding politics of AASECT.  AASECT was founded in 1967, as an organization of sexuality educators. In 1973, they made the controversial decision to welcome sex therapists into their community.  In order to bolster their professional legitimacy, sex therapists require that candidates for sex therapy certification attain licensure as professional mental health practitioners before they began training as certified sex therapists.  Because of the dangers of unprofessional sexual conduct between mental health practitioners and their vulnerable clients, touch between therapists and patients is strictly limited by State licensing bodies.  Surveys indicate that about 8% of clients have had unprofessional touch from mental health professionals up to and including sexual assault, with male therapists about three times more likely than female therapists to have admitted sexual contact with a client.  In this climate, it is unsafe for the professions or the public to fundamentally relax these professional boundaries even in the face of evidence in that touch can be therapeutic.  Thus, AASECT Certified Sexuality Educators have become bound by the legitimacy needs of sex therapists whether they made specific sense in many educational contexts.  

The awkwardness of this position has become increasingly evident over time as AASECT has established a reputation for providing high quality sexuality training in a larger society where such resources are relatively scarce.  A great many people attend AASECT events for this training that do not anticipate being able to benefit from AASECT certification or nor benefit from mental health licenses.   Sexual surrogates need sexuality training to work effectively with sex therapists as originally intended in protocols worked out by Masters and Johnson.  Although such auxiliary treatment is regarded as illegal sex work in many states, it is permitted in others, and AASECT does not certify surrogacy training, although it occasionally provides courses about working with sex surrogates.  Sex workers, massage therapists, tantra instructors, lifestyle educators, sex toy makers and marketers, and other sexuality professionals benefit from sound instruction on human sexuality and AASECT has not only historically been a good place to get it, but these other professionals enrich the diversity of discourse about human sexuality through their participation in AASECT.  But their participation in AASECT’s community also poses concerns about service, power, and equity.  AASECT’s mission is to educate the general public about human sexuality, but to specifically service the interests of its certified professionals who comprise most of its membership and vote on AASECT’s Directors. Certified Sex Therapists make up 80% of AASECTs certified professionals, and it is their interests that are most reflected in the actions of the AASECT Board of Directors.  Certified Members stay affiliated with AASECT longer and more of them vote in AASECT elections.

Professional Marginalization of Touch:  AASECT’s Code of Ethical Conduct is often the fulcrum of conflict about the differing needs and sensibilities of the various populations served by AASECT.  The code applies to all AASECT certified professions and is assumed to be aspirational for all AASECT trainees.  It enshrines boundaries appropriate for psychotherapists despite the fact that these are all subject to the aforementioned strict state licensing authorities, and educators are often practicing in contexts where they have lesser power over their clients and less need for strict boundaries.  This is even more true for allied sexuality professionals or sex workers whose work routinely uses touch.  One of the functions of AASECT’s boundary, whether intended or not, is to marginalize these other activities.  Often, it is specifically intended to do just that. 

During the past administration, and on the advice of the attorney provided AASECT by Bostrom, AASECT’s professional management company, the Board of Directors has approved an extension of this policy so as to ban AASECT Continuing Education Credits (CEs) for any experiential programs involving educational touch.  This is not part of the AASECT Code of Ethical Conduct but does govern what programs AASECT will mount itself or approve by AASECT approved CE providers.  It constitutes an aggressive change to protect AASECT from any adverse consequences of any such programs which might create legal liability for AASECT.  AASECT seems to have had advice from this attorney that the only way AASECT can be fully protected from such potential liability is a total ban on all CE for such programs. That advice, as far as it goes, is probably technically correct.  Certifying sexuality professionals carries some risk, certifying educational programs carries additional risk and the task of differentiating good programs involving touch from bad ones carries more risk.  In a stigmatized environment, any educational program caries some risk, and minimizing liability is a directorial responsibility.  Note also that Bostrom, which manages no other sexuality organizations, has no special interest in AASECT engaging in risks that might interfere with its ability to buy Bostrom’s liability.  From the point of view of Bostrom and their attorney, there is no advantage in carrying the risks of certifying programs that employ educational touch. 

If, as I have claimed, protecting CE for quality touch programs is a necessary part of AASECT’s business model, it is AASECT’s responsibility to use legal advice to protect such programs, not abandon CE for them.  I am not an attorney, but I seriously doubt that, should a mishap occur at an AASECT activity where AASECT approved the program and recruited the demonstrators, the fact that CE was not approved would significantly improve AASECT’s legal protection from possible damages.  It is quite possible to be a responsible director and doubt the protective value of this recommended policy.

AASECT’s History of Educational Programing: Previously, AASECT had approved on a case by case basis a very narrow handful of programs that would violate this recent ban on CEs for educational touch.  These were among the most popular and successful AASECT programs ever conducted, including a live clinical demonstration of a gynecological exam in 2006 in St Louis, and two Taste of Kink programs in Minneapolis in 2016 and Denver in 2018.  (An important point of self-disclosure here: my colleague Susan Wright and I are the designers of record for those Taste of Kink programs which were mounted in cooperation with the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group and demonstration teams recruited by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom which Susan chaired.  I have served on the NCSF Board since 2018.)  Occasional programs on tantra, spirituality, and other topics included limited touch.  All of these events that provided for consensual educational touch were optional sources of CEs, not mandatory for certification, but providing full credit towards it if trainees elected them. 

The most prominent experiential component of AASECT training is SARs, Sexual Attitude Reassessment programs that are a required component of all AASECT certifications.  They do not involve touch but do require participants to view and discuss a wide variety of sexuality topics include porn, sexual variability, coercive sexuality, gender expression, HIV, loss and stigma that are highly stressful for some participants.  Supervised group discussions provide stressed participants some support for dealing with their feelings about stressful material but also pressure to discuss it.   I describe this feature of the program here as context for later criticisms about optional CE programs that might involve touch as potentially too stressful for AASECT trainees.  AASECT is aware that practice of its professions in a sex negative culture is stressful, and that trainees come to AASECT in highly variable states of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and tolerance for different sexual content.

Harvard University is perhaps Americas best school. Not in human sexxulaity, however. They have no human sexuality program. No Ivy leagues school does, either. The Big Ten Conference has 14 schools. Only two have sexuality training programs, University of Michigan and Minnesota. Indiana University operates the Kinsey Institute. Such programs are highly exceptional rather than routine at American universities.

Why AASECT is the Certifying Body for Sexuality Training Programs: Why little AASECT with less than 3000 members and annual conferences of about 700 participants is brokering conversations about what constitutes credit worthy sexuality instruction is a consequence of much more powerful social institutions having abrogated their responsibility to undertake this task.  First on this list of non-joiners are most American academic institutions.  There are fewer sexuality degree programs in the US than in Canada which has less than one eighth our population, and many of the best US programs including Widener University and The University of Michigan School of Social Work’s Sexual Health Certificate Program train explicitly to standards developed by AASECT.   Second on the list are the mental health professional associations such as the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, and National Association of Social Workers all of whom train and talk about sexuality but have declined to set standards or even mount internal organizations to support systematic teaching and discussion of sexuality.  The American Psychological Association, for example, has 56 divisions including a division for men’s studies, one for women’s studies, and another for sexual orientation and gender diversity, but not one for human sexuality.  Organizations that explicitly train and certify competence to treat sex ‘addiction’ (International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals, IITAP and Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, SASH) and marital and relationship problems lack any human sexuality training requirements whatsoever.  Similar circumstances propelled Patricia Schiller JD, an SEC lawyer (that’s right, the United States Securities Exchange Commission, the outfit that regulates trading in stocks and bonds) to found AASECT over 50 years ago and these conditions persist to this day.  Like it or not, AASECT is in a position of relative power and authority to control what constitutes effective instruction in the fields of sexuality education, sexuality counseling, sex therapy, and the supervision of those disciplines, and AASECT’s actions dominate the professional ethics under which those professions are conducted.

The Core Criticism of AASECT’s Educational Touch Policy:  Up to this point one might imagine that I am primarily sympathetic to AASECT’s plight in this educational touch decision, and I am sympathetic with AASECT’s dilemma, but I am also one of AASECT’s most out and prominent critics of the decision to ban CE’s for programs including educational touch.   Having worked hard over the last 15 years to expand the field of sex therapy to include the treatment of kinky clients in our clientele, I am necessarily opposed to any decision that would damage our credibility or effectiveness in treating them.  This CE policy does that, and it does so unnecessarily.   But my opposition is not just theoretical and clinical.  I am in a leadership role in work with this community, and as a retired member and major donor to AASECT, I am free to take steps that other certified members could not for reasons of professional vulnerability.   It is my responsibility as an ally of these clients to take this position and to refuse to support AASECT if it marginalizes some of its clients in an attempt to protect itself. 

I maintain that AASECT’s first responsibility is to the clients of our certified members, and this properly belongs ahead of our collective self-interests, where those may diverge from those of our potential clients.   In this, I am listening to Michel Foucault, who 40 years ago observed that the history of sex since the Enlightenment was primarily about the professional guilds licensing their right to discuss and treat sex rather than about effectively protecting the public.  Somewhat prophetically, Foucault was among the first of the French intelligentsia to die in the HIV epidemic even as politicians opposed funding to combat this pandemic because AIDs should be viewed as God’s punishment for homosexual and recreational drug behaviors.  AASECT is not deliberately trying to harm kinky clients, tantra instructors, lifestyle educators and sex workers by banning CE’s for educational touch.   But they are making a stigmatizing choice absent the slightest scientific evidence that fully accrediting these programs makes AASECT’s professionals’ clients or AASECT’s trainees more vulnerable to any social ills whatsoever.

The core of my argument is that risky and powerful as touch may be, touch is a core part of human sexuality and integral to our business.  If AASECT does not effectively license and permit experiential training that involves touch, clients will be further exposed to underqualified professionals, a problem that has plagued the historical treatment by the well-meaning but self-interested mental health professions.  For example, these professionals have only recently stopped categorically classifying a wide spectrum of diverse sexual interests and practices as prima facie evidence of psychopathology.  That only stopped in 2013 with the publication of DSM – 5.  Modern data shows that sexual variability is not in and of itself pathological. 

An early protest against the Operation Spanner prosecutions. All of the gay sadomasochists eventually served time for their convictions and Britain’s laws disallowing consent as a defense against criminal assault were eventually upheld by Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights. Positive legacies of Spanner include the rise of BDSM advocacy groups like the Spanner Trust and NCSF, and educational programs for kinksters and law enforcement differentiating kink from abuse.

But a look at the list of diverse practices certainly gives even the most casual observer pause that some kink activities include elevated risks relative to conventional and socially approved of sex practices.  Coitus is rarely life threatening except through disease transmission, but choking, sexual asphyxia and bondage can be dangerous.  BDSM practices often mimic violence and are often misunderstood as violence.  And a very high degree of sexual violence is already readily tolerated in many cultures, especially intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual assault.  It is not automatically stigmatizing to negatively impact relatively safe kink practices in the effort to curb other prevalent dangerous practices.   This was at the core of the infamous 1988 Operation Spanner Case in which the British equivalent of our Supreme Court eventually ruled that consent should not constitute a defense against criminal charges of assault lest victims of IPV, who routinely decline to prosecute their assailants, be deprived of the protection of criminal statutes.  The narrow ruling may have been unfair to the tiny number of consenting gay sadomasochists in this Spanner case, but it would constitute a greater unfairness to the much greater number of IPV victims if their continuous consent was required to proceed with prosecutions designed to protect them.   For the record, I completely understand the sexual freedom is not the ultimate value in all matters, and it must sometimes be subordinate to other goods.

Betty Dodson has extended the field of sex therapy into body positivity with her training efforts to have women examine their genitals. She never pursued AASECT certification as an educator or therapist precisely to side step the limits imposed on touch by the AASECT Code of Ethical Conduct.

That said, abdicating responsibility for approving quality CE experiences involving touch undermines the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health, suggests that such instruction is not valuable enough to defend, and surrenders leadership in the field that many historical figures as diverse as Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson and Betty Dodson, Beverly Whipple and John Money, Gina Ogden and David Schnarch and Peggy Kleinplatz have worked hard to establish.  Some, like Dodson, were never AASECT Members, but tried hard to expand the field, explicitly used nudity and touch.   When I came to the field, the bio-psycho-social model of sex therapy extolled by Helen Singer Kaplan was very influential, and bio was clearly understood to include touch and pleasure but that model broadened sex therapy by challenging that idea that behaviorism held all the important insights in understanding sexual expression,.   While touch has always been important, its importance and how to teach about it have been subject to continual struggle and revision.   The AASECT Code of Ethical Conduct was intended to be the bulwark that defended AASECT’s legitimacy while struggling to teach stigmatized content.   This marks a great divergence in AASECT from organizations like APA.  In the American Psychological Association, every member operated under boundary rules that the state licensing authorities have adopted under APA’s urging.   All clinical practitioners operate under state regulations.  And most struggles in APA are between their different practice environments of academic and clinical practitioners.  So, contrary to incorrect reports from AASECT officials in trying to sell their CE ban for consensual touch, APA does not have any such ban.  We at NCSF wrote to the APA and checked.  The popular touch-based programs formerly held at AASECT were all accepted for APA CE credit.  Academic psychologists do not need a touch ban for University training and the great diversity of therapy disciplines and practices already have licensing boundaries.  AASECT officials erroneously tried to bolster the legitimacy of their proposed boundary because someone much more powerful than AASECT did it and our CE needs to be reciprocal with theirs.  Although I’m not sure that reciprocity assumption might require some checking, after all, APA does not even require training in human sexuality in their own accreditation processes, APA has no ban.  It is regrettable the official most responsible for CE with APA didn’t actually check to see that their claim was true.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 2020

Touch: Prologue

The next four posts explore the problem of using educational touch in the training of sexuality educators, sexuality counselors, and sex therapists.  By implication, it covers all professionals and paraprofessionals in sexuality, from medicine to sex workers.

This discussion arises in the context of professional regulation and consumer protection, but it has a much broader context.  Given that I have subtitled this blog “Kink in Context”, that deserves a little elucidation up front.

Leather contests look alot like the intersection of a beauty pageants and professionalism. Professionalism as a legitimacy tactic is not exclusively the province of therapists and educators!

In the face of stigma surrounding sexuality, everyone involved is concerned about their legitimacy.  This is why early in this blog I described the work of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault, this was one of their prime interests.  One of the main strategies for solving the legitimacy problem is professionalism.  It is commonly believed that professionals are trained, objective, scientific, expert, and put the needs of consumers and the public first, or at least very high in their ethics.  Very often, those common understandings are mostly true.  But not always.  That is why I have included critics of professionalism so prominently in this discussion.

This makes almost every post, including this series, indeed in all of Elephant, a post about ethics.  We have discussed the ethics of kink, ethics of psychoanalysis, ethics of sexuality research, and the ethics of the professions.  Ethics, of course, is about resolving values conflicts. 

In scientific research, the resolution of conflict between different theoretical models is primarily a conflict of data interpretation and the technical problems of arranging for gathering evidence that resolves theoretical disputes.  But eventually, even the most abstruse technical problems give way in science to value conflicts when it becomes time to make resource allocation decisions about which test to conduct next.  This goes part of the way to explain the uncanny relationship between the scientific insights of any given era to the zeitgeist of that era.   The larger thinking of an era influences what scientific topics are regarded as relevant, important, and worth funding; and scientific insights inform how we think about the world and establish how the world works and what is socially important.   The unknown gets framed by the known.

Salvador Dali’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. You might not think of Freudian theory as very scientific. In the early twentieth century it was regarded as cutting edge science and had a huge influence on surrealism.

But much of what is important about human sexuality is regarded as emotional and intensely subjective.  This has led many to argue that sexuality is not a proper subject for scientific study, and not subject to legitimate professionalization.  It has led Nazis to destroy the Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research, and Tennessee to ban the teaching of Darwinian evolution leading to the theater of the Scopes trial.  It has resulted in a serious campaign to institute abstinence-only education in American schools and to defund Planned Parenthood.  It has led CDC to become more concerned about expunging language like ‘fetus’ and “evidence-based” from its documents than preparing for the current global pandemic.  The fear of subjectivity is a key part of the fear of sexuality.  Of course, subjectivity is profound in kink, where the ultimate justification for any consensual sexual practice is, ”I like it!”  Think Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s amanuensis in Man of La Mancha.

Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick in Man of La Mancha sings “I Like Him!” He may not know why, but he certainly feels it!

I will close with the following conclusion that is largely inspired by the work of Edward D Cheng, JD of Vanderbilt University.  What he said of torts applies liberally to all social construction, but the words that follow are my application of his insights about tort law.

The illusion of factual causality:

Sometimes causality can be definitively established.  I release my grip on the mike and it drops to the floor due to gravity.  But in the social construction of reality the interesting and very common cases do not involve clear consensus as to cause.  Often factual causation cannot be established:

Perhaps only correlational or anecdotal data are available.

Perhaps parties cannot agree as to what constitutes data.

Perhaps they agree, but multiple and/or mutual causality creates conflict or ambiguity as to cause.

Perhaps no relevant data exists.

Perhaps data exists, but they conflict.

It is my claim that these are the difficult and interesting cases in torts and in social construction of reality.

In these circumstances, value-free or purely logical social construction is impossible.

Edward Cheng, JD. Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University

If you thought to do value-free psychotherapy based upon a solid scientific foundation was going to be possible, think again.  All slopes are slippery.  The object of this blog is to help you strap on skis.

© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD, Ann Arbor, MI March 2020